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INTEODUOTORT. 



These papers are in part a recast of some letters contrib- 
uted to the public press of tlie United States during a visit 
to Europe in 1879 and 1880, and in part fresh matter from 
original notes then taken. The wide republication here and 
abroad of many of the newspaper letters suggested the prep- 
aration of this volume. 

The several sketches are mainly in the direction of com- 
parative studies of social and political life in other countries. 
The volume is, however, less symmetrical in this respect than 
I could have wished now, for the reason that this line of 
treatment was not an original plan — the work only drifting 
that way in the gradual course of travel and writing. 

Comparative study has been the rule of advancement in all 
knowledge this century, and advance in the sciences of politics 
and society will best be made by the same means. We cannot 
compare our own institutions and form of government with 
those of other nations until we understand them, and we can 
never thoroughly understand them until we see them brought 
out in relief against the background of other countries. 

In other countries and in former times responsibility for the 
social and political progress of any nation has been confined 
to a small and highly-favored class. With us it rests upon 
the whole people. The education of foreign travel — once the 
privilege and pleasure of a few — has, therefore, become the 
duty of every American citizen. The citizen is the statesman 
now. If this is not the Providential intent of the flood of 
European travel which annually leaves our shores, it is cer- 
tainly its fortunate opportunity. 

Any contribution, however imperfect, to this comparative 
study of ourselves ought to be of some use to some portions 
of our people. In Chapter XVII. of this work I have at- 
tempted to show that aid in this work is the most useful 
function now left to our diplomatic service and the best reason 
for its present existence. 

Along the pathway of travel and study I have endeavored 



4 INTRODUCTORY. 

to give, wherever possible, some of that more intimate and 
personal information which every educated traveller so often 
feels the want of, and which for some reason will not get into 
the guide-books^the special uses of special places, the best 
economies of time and route and intellectual energies, the tried 
and tested equipment of books, — that kind of information 
gotten only by experience, always costly, and which to one en 
route for the first or only time generally comes too late for use. 
And in this matter of information, a closing word of coun- 
sel. Much of the higher value of travel is often lost for want 
of some reasonable provision beforehand for taking all of the 
advantage of foreign life. Old lands, with their endless asso- 
ciations, have such charms for the New- World citizen that 
he is apt to think of nothing but the pleasure of wandering 
at will among their ruins, their grandeur, their unaccustomed 
and suggestive sights and sounds. 

The highest expression of any living land, however, is its 
society, which is the fruit of all its years or centuries of 
\ struggle and longing. He only sees a land who knows its 
j \ people. England, for instance, which, by reason of language 
! land race is the most profitable ground for American travel, 
■ lone can only begin to appreciate by meeting personally some 
members of some of its distinctive and defined classes, and 
seeing them in the setting of their own homes. A single 
day spent in a cathedral close ; in an old castle, with an his- 
toric family, still its living soul, yet in it ; in an English 
gentleman's country-house, that charming flower of a well- 
^ perfected order of life ; in the college-cloisters of one of the 
ancient universities ; in a substantial farm-house ; or, if one 
cannot do any better, in a humble, out-of-the-way inn, will give 
more insight into the social structure and historical civilization 
of England than a whole cycle of existence in hotels or helpless 
rambling with red books among show ruins and over beaten 
highways. These are the pictures which are the real histori- 
j cal paintings of the country. To get a stereoscopic view of 
England one should enter all these doors and many others. 
That good fortune, of course, can only come to very few, but 
all may enjoy some one " interior," and from it, like a skilled 
anatomist, construct to his own conception the whole fabric of 
the body politic and social. 

Philadelphia, November 15, 1880. 



ENGLISH TOWNS. 



I 



OOISTTENTS. 



ENGLISH TOWNS. 



I. — Chester 

II.— York .... 
III. — Shottery . 
IV. — Reading in Berkshire 
Y. — Lancaster . 
YI. — University Towns : Oxford 
YII. — University Towns : Cambridge 



PAGE 

9 
19 
25 
30 
36 
44 
61 



ENGLISH POLITICS. 

VIIL — English Political Life . 

IX. — Gladstone 

X. — An English Election 
XI. — The Interrogation Point in Politics 
XII. — Comparative Cost of Government 
XIII. — Parliament, — The House of Commons 
XIY. — Parliament, — The House of Commons 
XY. — Parliament, — The House of Commons 
XYI. — Parliament, — The House of Lords 
XYII. — Foreign Service .... 
XYIII. — Comparative Politics 



79 

84 

92 

99 

103 

109 

118 

126 

142 

145 

151 



LONDON. 

XIX. — Westminster Abbey 
XX. — The London Pulpit 
XXI. — The Play and the Theatre 
XXII. — The London Times . 
XXIII. — Historic Taverns 

1* 



165 
175 

189 
196 
207 



Q CONTENTS. 

SCOTLAND. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXIY. — Entering Scotland 223 

XXV. — Scottish Notes 230 

XXVI. — Towards the Hebrides .... 238 

XXVII.— Io»fA 247 

NORTHERN ITALY. 

XXVIII.— Venice 265 

XXIX.— Genoa . . . . . . . .276 

XXX.— Pisa 286 

XXXI.— Siena 293 

XXXII.— Oryieto 305 

XXXIII.— PiSTOJA 314 

XXXIV.— Ravenna 322 

ROME. 
XXXV. — Rome the Centre .... 



. 331 

XXXVI. — St. Peter's, and Italian Preaching . 336 

XXXVII.— The Pantheon 346 

XXXVIII.— Prison of St. Paul and St. Peter. . 353 
XXXIX. — The Palace of the Inquisition . . 362 
XL. — Constantine's Battle-Pield . . . 367 
•XLI. — Ostia — The Pompeii of Roman Civili- 
zation 374 

MODERN ITALY. 

XLII.— New Rome 385 

XLIII.— United Italy 393 

XLIV.— Gariealdi 402 

XLV.— Modern Italy 409 

XLVI.— The Italian Life 422 

APPENDIX. 

Hints of Travel 435 



CHAPTER I. 

CHESTER. 

The Entrakce-Porch to England — An Initial Walk — 
The Old Home — Vitiation oe the Language — The 
Soldier and the Beggar — Coming Differentiation of 
the English and American Language — The Vignette 
Cathedral Scene of England. 

Chester is the vignette scene of England, and a 
very cliarming one. Within fifteen miles of Liver- 
pool, and trains running out almost hourly, the expe- 
rienced traveller can, and the judicious one will, avoid 
that monotonous town consecrated to trade and lucre, 
and spend his first night in England in a little country 
village representativ^e and typical of the most English 
of English scenery. Indeed, if circumstances permit, 
I would advise that the visitor ^w^alk from Liverpool 
to Chester. It is a short distance, over excellent roads, 
and the walk will give one at once an idea of English 
landscape which it w^ould take weeks of railway travel 
to acquire. 

The walk will be made along green lanes and by 
hedges and under avenues of great trees which form a 
picture not to be forgotten, and answering completely 
to what is, perhaps, the conventional conception of any 
well-read person of rural England. To an educated 
American, indeed, all England is so familiar by pic- 
tures, literature, and legend that, entering it for the 
first time, he feels as if he were coming home again 
instead of visiting a strange land, — as if he had been 
there before in a half-remembered childhood or in a 
dream, and were part of it. This indefinable sense of 
a previous knowledge is not, I think, a mere intellec- 

9 



10 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

tual photograph or illusion, the impression of years of 
early or long reading. It is the assertion of a race in- 
stinct. Froissart — that most picturesque of old chroni- 
clers — does not prepare one so for Normandy, nor does 
Boccaccio for Italy. Any one who goes to Rome for the 
first time recognizes at once the Pantheon or the Col- 
osseum, and the stranger at Paris enters the Madeleine 
confidently without question of guide or guide-book, 
but he knows them, however, as he knows the pyra- 
mids and obelisks, and he has not that feeling of kin- 
dredship, that sense of his own merger in them, which 
is one of the great charms of English travel. 

Although to American eyes simply a charming 
country village of a few thousand inhabitants, Chester 
is by English law a city, being a cathedral site, and 
fairly bubbles over with tradition, legend, and history, 
so that one feels like looking on its very humblest 
people with respect as the richly-dowered " heirs of all 
the ages.'^ These heirs, however, save the cultured 
aristocracy, who are few in numbers and mostly of ec- 
clesiastical savor or relation of some kind to the cathe- 
dral, with its ancient establishment, seem poor and 
struggling, and I fancy would gladly give up all their 
historic privileges for a quarter-section of American 
prairie. 

Our Pennsylvania town preserves the full name and 
tradition of this site better than its English ancestor. 
For long i^eriods of history this old Chester was known 
as West Chester, — -just what it was under the Romans, 
the " west camp" of the province, " Chester'^ being the 
very natural corruption of our rude forefathers for the 
Latin castra. Chester's first interest, indeed, comes to 
us from its associations as an ancient Roman fortress or 
stronghold. Here, about the time of Christ, was sta- 
tioned the Twentieth Legion (about a brigade of our 
army), keeping down our barbarian ancestors. Stone 
coffins and other Roman antiquities are still dug up 
from time to time, and one or two handsome Roman 



CHESTER. 1 1 

crvpts, discovered after centuries of disuse, have been 
put to modern use as wine-cellars. It is a natural mili- 
tary position, having been seized on by those excellent 
soldiers, the Romans, and well fortified, and has been 
a centre of tough fighting ever since. Its distinction 
in this respect is grounded on sound military and geo- 
graphical reasons, and will endure. When the Romans 
had gone, the Danes held its abandoned walls to the 
bitter end against King Alfred. It was the last point 
taken by William tiie Conqueror, the last fortress to 
lower the Saxon standard before the Norman banners. 
From a tower on its walls, which is now a relic, they 
show you the spot where King Charles I. stood and 
sav/ his army and his kingdom melt away before his 
eyes down on the moors below. There will be a battle 
here again when the Germans invade England, if Eng- 
lishmen still keep up their fathers' fashion of fighting 
for their soil inch by inch. From a military point of 
view, Chester is topographically " the last ditch" of a 
lost cause in England. 

All the town is surrounded by a huge wall w^ith 
balustrades of brick, and at the angles fortified with 
towers, which in their day swept the faces of their 
sections of the wall and commanded its approaches. 
Along the top of this wall you walk now, and see on 
one side the moors — which, I suppose, in the old times, 
when defence was the first consideration, could be 
flooded by the Dee, a tranquil little stream answering 
in size and appearance to the American creek — and 
the other the near hills of Wales. Our guide, an en- 
thusiastic and slightly bibulous '^ freeman" of Chester, 
looked on these hills yet with only half-repressed in- 
dignation as the abode of marauders and thieves, whom 
we might momentarily expect to swoop down. In- 
deed, in the excitement of historic declamation, relating 
the past military and ecclesiastical glories of his native 
city, I think sometimes he got the centuries mixed up, 
and mingled his own troubles with the statelier tragedies 



X2 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

which marked the fall of thrones and turned the course 
of history. 

Inside the walls, in the "old city/' every building 
and street is quaint and picturesque, and the narrow 
ways are fairly crowded with houses that are historic 
and pregnant with suggestion. There is the summer 
residence of King Henry VIII., a low, mud-walled 
building, not twelve feet high, but which so short a 
time ago was a fit dwelling for a monarch. It sounds 
rather comical now, but there is in Chester a charitable 
foundation of this many-wived King Henry for the 
perpetual support of " six widows." The widows are 
to-day enjoying this benefit. 

Through a brick alley-passage not five feet wide 
you come on the ancient palace of the great Earl of 
Derby, a soldier and statesman, who in old times 
headed armies, levied war against his king, and for 
that act parted with his head on the scaffold. This 
place is a rackety structure of two low stories, hardly 
high enough to stand up in, and is now occupied by a 
family of the poorest sort in a city where poverty 
is squalid and wretched to an extent that we happily 
know nothing of. A dirty, red-haired girl with torn 
petticoats and a hungry-looking face received us on 
the threshold and offered the modern hospitalities of 
the palace. 

Another huilding strikingly quaint and suggestive 
of ancient manners is a long, low structure, gabled and 
antique, which, some six or seven hundred years ago, 
was the residence of a great bishop who ruled in Chester. 
It is more spacious and imposing than either of the 
others just mentioned. Along the entire front, of some 
eighty feet, runs a gallery something like the inclosed 
porch of a Lancaster County hotel. The whole front 
of this house, from the roof to the ground, is covered 
with carved and graven images in wood of curious and 
often grotesque design. Two entirely nude figures, 
man and woman, are shown you by the guide, and one 



CHESTER: 13 

fayade has been cancelled and shaven plain, the imagery 
being too gross for modern eyes. 

These odd old buildings, their whole fronts covered 
with curious w^ooden carvings, and many of them de- 
voted now to the commonest and humblest uses, give a 
general effect to Chester which is stronger and more im- 
pressive than any of the detached " shows'^ which here, 
as in any locality, are always forced on the stranger. 
This fantastic tracery of steep gables and overhanging 
eaves and brown skeleton rafters, the lean ribs of cen- 
turies, and quaint relievos, half-religious, half-pagan, — 
this and the beautiful view stretching out over peaceful 
water and meadow to the delicate filmy contour of the 
Welsh mountains are the pictures of the place. 

The great sight of Chester, of course, is her cathedral, 
the central point which gathers up her history from the 
time of King Alfred. It is not large compared with 
others in the island, but, half in ruins, is beautiful and 
picturesque beyond description. This cathedral, like 
all the great churches of England, is a pantheon. In 
St. Paul's and Westminster lie the dead of the nation. 
In Chester and other country churches or cathedrals 
sleep the local great. These grand graves, where those 
men who have deserved well of their country and their 
fellows are gathered in noble com])anionship and hon- 
ored for ages, are a powerful stimulus to great thought 
and heroic action, and must tend strongly to elevate 
those who live near them and w^orship in them, drawing 
them daily away from the ignoble struggle for mere 
gain of money, and lifting them up to better things. 
For in all this country, for which wealth has done so 
much, I have not found one name enshrined there in 
honor merely for its riches, and any man or boy may 
be buried in the greatest church of his county or the 
kingdom if he does some service to his fellows worthy 
of recognition and remembrance. In this beautiful 
cathedral of Chester, consecrated by art, legend, and re- 
ligion, among the bishops and statesmen and generals 



14 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

of centuries, I have found the names of young soldiers, 
without rank, fortune, or family, who died only a few 
years ago in the Crimea. 

In St. PauFs grand pile, where lie Wellington, and 
Nelson, and Sir John Moore, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
and John Howard, and Bishop Heber, and Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, there are inscribed, with equal honor, the 
names of some poor unknown ship-boys who in a great 
naval action went down nobly, standing to their 
duty as grandly and as faithfully as admiral or general. 
As I looked at this tablet some young sergeants, proud 
of their early chevrons, and of a regiment on its way 
to the African war, were poring earnestly over the 
names, and I knew that the real service of this cathe- 
dral would be offered some day in silence on the battle- 
fields of Zulu) and. 

It is impossible, of course, to describe in words such 
a cathedral as this, — a building which is the result of 
the consecrated labor, art, and devotion of centuries. 
And it is but one of many. They must be seen to be 
conceived, and when seen can only be known through 
the eye of culture and history. 

Chester cathedral is not by any means the one to 
select as the prelude to a course of systematic study, 
but it does well enough to break in with. One must 
do his aesthetic teething somewhere, and Chester answers 
very well for that purpose. 

Right here at Chester, on the threshold of England, 
one strikes an English habit which is offensive to Amer- 
ican taste, and which will jar on the ear during one's 
entire stay in the country, — viz., the corruption, by illiter- 
ate contraction, of the language. This process of de- 
terioration is going steadily on in all classes. Cheshire, 
the county name, is slovenly and ignorant English for 
Chestershire, but it has been adopted by all England, 
although its origin must have been from the thick-lipped 
hinds. Cheshire is clownish, and means nothing; Ches- 



CHESTER. 15 

tersliire is sonorous, stately, and records two volumes of 
English national history, — the Latin rule of the camp 
and the Saxon rule of the shire. 

The lower-class Englishman is thoroughly illiterate, 
and often succeeds in stamping his illiteracy on the na- 
tion. There cannot be a neglected class in any com- 
munity without the whole community suffering for it. 
Just as the Southern people in our country acquired a 
negro twang and dialect, the black nurses teaching it 
to the white children, so to-day the English language in 
England suffers at the hands of its large uneducated 
and neglected class, and it has come to pass that Eng- 
lish gentlemen cannot keep even their aristocratic 
Dames intact, but accept them back from their servants 
mutilated and vulgarized in sound. Thus Beauchamp 
has deteriorated to Beacham, Beauvoir to Beaver, Stan- 
hope to Stannup, Cholmondeley to Chumly, St. John 
to Sinjin, Marjoribanks to Marshbanks, Worcester to 
Wooster, Leicester to Lester, Greenwich to Greenitch, 
Chaworth to Chorth, Woolwich to Woolich, Ha worth 
to Horth, Hawarden to Harden, Warwick to Warick, 
Taliaferro to Toliver, St. Botolph^s-town to Boston, 
Sandys to Sands, Wemyss to Weems, Dillwyn to Dil- 
lan, Strachan to Strawn, Mainwearing to Mannering, 
and so on from one end of the island to the other. 

This vulgar and servile pronunciation, especially of 
the lordly old Norman names, is very marked and very 
unpleasant to a stranger. But it is retribution. Eng- 
land has not been true to her trust in the matter of 
common education. With universities and schools far 
beyond anything we can pretend to, with a clergy 
educated greatly beyond our grade and enjoying in the 
days of priories and abbeys the monopoly of educa- 
tion, she has kept her talent of learning selfishly folded 
in a napkin for the exclusive uses of one class. Now 
the wronged classes avenge themselves. 

Indeed, the wrong against the noble language of Mil- 
ton and Shakespeare is very prevalent throughout all 



IQ ENGLISH TOWNS. 

England, high and low. If the lower-class Englishman 
drops his "h's/^ the upper-class Englishman drops his 
" w's ;" and I do not know that the offence is in any- 
way mitigated because fashion approves the one elision 
and disapproves the other. ^'Extraordinary" is a ^ood 
shibboleth with Avhich to test the Englishman. Very 
rarely does he successfully master the " d.'^ 

It sometimes seems as if the special function of the 
United States with regard to our common English lan- 
guage were to be its preservation by the general educa- 
tion of the whole people. England has shown that no 
special centres of education, however excellent, respected, 
or sacred, will protect the purity of the tongue against 
masses of ignorance and servility. 

This lazy vitiation of the English by the dropping 
of letters, and sometimes of whole syllables, is in con- 
stant progress in England on a grand scale, enervating 
the language in form and sound, and were there no 
communication between the two countries would soon, 
with other influences, result in two tongues related to 
each other like French and Spanish or Spanish and 
Italian. As it is, the process of differentiation has al- 
ready set in, but it is hourly counteracted by the inces- 
sant intercommunication of the two peoples. 

As this different use of words will confront the 
stranger all the time in England, I give here some 
illustrations to show on how large a scale the variation 
has already begun : 

English. American. 

Shop. Store. 

Shopkeeper. Storekeeper, merchant. 

Shares, shareholder. Stock, stockholder. 

Chairman (of a company). President. 

Eailway. Eailroad. 

High level (railway). Elevated. 

Station. Depot. 

Shunt. Switch. 

Stoker. Pireman. 

Guard. Conductor. 

Driver. Engineer. 



CHESTER. 



17 



English. 

Booking-office. 
Goods, 
Carriage. 
"The cars." 
Line. 
Chemist. 
Lift. 

Tram, tramways. 
Outing. 
Post. 
To book. 

To post (a letter). 
To book (a seat). 
To *' take in" (a newspaper) 
Quite, in the sense of 
Public-house. 
Spirits. 
Meat-shop. 
Tub. 

Cab, cabman. 
Inn. 

Luggage, luggage-van. 
To register (luggage). 
Stick. 

The hustings. 
The Ministry. 
Member. 

" Contesting a seat" for Parlia- 
ment. 



A^nerican. 

Ticket-office. 

Freight. 

Car. 

"The train." 

Track. 

Druggist. 

Elevator. 

Street-cars. 

Excursion. 

Mail. 

To charge. 

To mail. 

To buy a ticket. 

To subscribe for. 

Entirely. 

Tavern. 

Liquor. 

Butcher-shop. 

Bath. 

Hack, hack-driver. 

Hotel. 

Baggage, baggage- wagon, -car. 

To check (baggage). 

Cane. 

The stump. 

The Cabinet. 

Representative. 

" Running" for Congress. 



Who can translate into exact American " young per- 
son'' as uttered by a British dame ? How shall one ex- 
press, under our different social conditions, the contempt 
and disgust of "cad" ? What equivalent have we on 
this side of the Atlantic for those great structural ver- 
tebrae of an Englishman's speech, " really," " ah," 
"haw," "now"? 

Were it not for the large and continuous intercom- 
munication of books and magazines and newspapers, 
of letters and telegrams and travel, the languages would 
even now be standing widely apart. 

The "Kows," the guide-book feature of Chester, were 

a disappointment. They are a curiosity, of course, but 

b 2* 



18 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

greatly overrated. The best description, perhaps, is in 
one of Dickens's later novels, but the great novelist 
wrote of them like a reporter paid by the column, and 
from his trained imagination built up a curiously in- 
volved and very interesting structure on a rather com- 
monplace foundation of fact. The Rows run only for 
a few short blocks, and are simply a deep porch set far 
in each house and open from house to house. One 
can walk continuously for the distance of a block along 
the porches just as on the street below. At the end of 
each block, however, he must descend to the street, 
ascending again at the next block. In time, small shops 
have been opened in the second story, and you have 
thus a double shopping-front for a small distance. It 
is only this, and nothing more. 

Chester's greatness and interest lie in her historic 
riches, — her wealth of culture, legend, religious tradi- 
tion, and power, — and it seems a pity that she should be 
labelled and ear-marked for travellers by what is at best 
but a curiosity and but an item in her vast repertoire 
of things curious and quaint. 

Entering this pleasing vestibule of England, you 
meet at once two figures unpleasant to the American 
eye, — the soldier and the beggar. Here they are in 
these quiet sylvan shades and echoless cloisters, and 
they never leave you wherever you go in Europe. The 
poverty and beggary of Chester are very repulsive to 
one unacquainted with the squalor and wretchedness of 
this continent, and it is something very sad to see them 
in a village town whose chief monument and distinction 
is a venerable cathedral, and which itself is almost a 
cathedral close. The British scarlet and gold, too, 
flashes along these leafy streets and under ruined walls 
and still moss-grown arches, — wherever, in fact, a Brit- 
ish nursemaid strays. The English drum-beat echoes 
every day around the entire globe, which is grand, but 
it is also heard every night in every peaceful county 
of England, which is not so grand. 



YORK. 19 



CHAPTER II. 

YORK. 

An Old Cathedral City — The Gateway to Historic Eng- 
land — A Traveller's Plight — The English Cathedrals 
— Story of their Building and what they Cost — The 
NEW Uses of the Old Temples Stripped of their Pic- 
tures AND Idols — An English Rest. 

York is the historic gateway by which to enter Eng- 
land. The stress of modern travel carries one to 
Liverpool, and, while its suburban confine of Chester is 
a very picturesque and pleasing vignette portal, it has 
no historical significance. The traveller who comes to 
study England will do weR to leave there after a day 
and strike directly for York. This is in conflict with 
all the modern routes of travel ; but, as these routes 
have been determined for the use and advantage of 
railway companies rather than the pleasure or profit of 
travellers, they are no guide to an intelligent seeing of 
the country, and are often a harm. 

York was a stronghold of our ancient Briton fathers 
and a capital seat of rude power away back in the mists 
before the time of Christ. It was the capital of the 
Roman empire in Britain, and the old Roman military 
walls around the city are still standing in a wonderful 
state of preservation. You could fight a battle from 
them to-day did the conditions of modern warfare allow 
it. In the streets and buildings and remains you see 
the record successively of the Roman period of English 
history, the Saxon, the Norman, and modern England 
from the Plantagenets through the Commonwealth down 
to Victoria. In the walls and arches of the great 
minster you read the whole history of English archi- 



20 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

tecture, — Saxon, Norman, Late Norman, Early English, 
Decorated, Early Perpendicular, Perpendicular, Late 
Perpendicular. York is a kindergarten of English 
history for grown folks. 

In its name York is another illustration of the in- 
herited and hopeless tendency of the Englishman to a 
corruption, by contraction, of the language. " York" 
is the stately and civilized " Eboracum" of the Latins 
as it has come down to us through the thick-lipped 
Saxons and half-articulating Britons, only the rude 
guttural remains of a once polished word. 

Coming to York on the last day of a racing week, I 
had an experience very odd to an American. This 
town, with a modern population of fifty thousand and 
some twenty centuries of dignity, has hardly the hotel 
accommodation of one of our Western towns of ten 
thousand people. Every inn was full, and the land- 
lords did not seem to feel under the least obligation to 
provide for any one. When all their rooms were full 
they seemed to think their duty ended, although this 
thing must occur again and again. In nearly all the 
old towns of England the hotel provision is simply 
ridiculous, judged by our necessities. After driving to 
the half-dozen or so modest-sized inns of the place 
without getting a lodgment, I was about taking the train 
again to find a roof for the night, when some citizen 
who had watched the quest directed me to a private 
house where lodging, he thought, might be had. I 
found there very good apartments and fair service 
and meals, but at a cost greater than the Windsor in 
New York or the St. George in Philadelphia. 

Much of the interest of the town attaches to its 
Norman period, as you read it in castle and bar and 
ruined abbey, although in this epoch of its splendor 
and power York was but a town of ten thousand in- 
habitants. The Normans, however, cared very little 
for monotonous figures. Although great sailors, they 
had only moderate capacity as traders ; but as soldiers, 



FORK. 21 

pripsts, artists, poets and builders, the force of their 
time, they left their stamp indelibly. They made his- 
tory rather than textile fabrics or patent machinery. 

the glory of York, however, — as it is one of the 
glories of England, — is its great cathedral or minster; 
and it is the object chiefest worthy of study in the 
place. It is indeed a very good specimen with which to 
begin the study of the English cathedrals. These noble 
cathedrals of England, spread over all the land, are 
one of the first and strongest impressions of the king- 
dom on the stranger. They are so grand, so beautiful, 
so living, like breathing hearts of stone, that seeing 
them one feels at once as if he had never seen a church 
before. They seem not of this world, but of some 
other world ; higher and better houses not made with 
hands, but born of an art and a conception beyond 
our modern powders. 

But when one reflects what they are and what they 
mean, they start a singularly involved social problem, 
and the cold judgment inclines against them. They 
are the product and represent that dreary and profitless 
stretch of English history from the Norman conquest 
to the Reformation, — five wretched centuries of want 
and ignorance and human suffering and stagnation. 
They are tlie outcome, and with a few castles and 
splendid abbeys the whole outcome, of the five hundred 
years in which England was a province of the modern 
Roman empire, the people and the kings of England 
ruled over by cardinal-princes, — the ecclesiastical pro- 
consuls of Rome. During this period all the other 
countries of Europe were similar provinces, and these 
wonderful cathedrals went up in them all. You recog- 
nize at once the essential idea of them, the grand con- 
ception, the spirit of the work, as you meet them again 
in France and Germany and North Italy. The ca- 
thedral stands out everywhere as the dominant idea of 
that period and the symbol of its power. This idea in 
the different development of our day is lost, and you 



22 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

cannot reproduce these old cathedrals now. It has 
been tried, but with inevitable failure. No study or 
imitation of the old proportions will fashion a building 
like unto those which yet speak for their dead age. 
You may get something which is like the form, but it 
is not the living form : it is a corpse. The soul has 
forever fled. 

Now, what is painful to think of in relation to these 
lovely cathedrals is this : These magnificent buildings, 
that seem almost to glow with faith and beauty, drank 
the life-blood of England. During the period of their 
building England was almost stationary. There was 
no social advance and no social hope. There were no 
homes in England as we know them now. There was 
no freedom as we know it now, little of comfort, and 
nothing of progress. From A.D. 1100 to a.d. 1400 the 
population of England advanced but ten per cent, a 
century, less than one-tenth of one per cent, a year. 
For the people there was no wealth, no education, no 
trade or commerce. There was deficient food, shelter, 
and clothing, and, in consequence, continuous disease 
and epidemic. There was chronic war. It was a time 
of plague, pestilence, and famine, of battle and murder, 
and of sudden death. There was no science, there was 
no art save in the direction of ecclesiastical architecture 
and adornment. 

Yet it was the same England, with the same people, 
soil, climate, and resources, as to-day. But one-fourth 
of the adult population of that time are computed to 
have been priests, monks, nuns, and their hangers-on 
and attendants, non-productive persons and an eco- 
nomic burden on the other three-fourths, whose produc- 
tive powers were still further lessened by a long list of 
saints' days, and a heavy drain for military purposes. 
This is the England of these beautiful abbeys and ven- 
erable priories and stately cathedrals. All over Europe 
these buildings are a magnificent demonstration of or- 
ganized ecclesiastical power and a wonderful flowering 



YORK. 23 

of ?esthetic force, but it has been all at the cost and sac- 
rifice of the common jieople, whose " bodies are the 
temples of the living God/^ For them these silent 
gray cathedrals meant intellectual and civil starvation, 
social degradation, physical ill health, aud the shorten- 
ing of life. 

For one who wants to drink in the beauty of the 
cathedrals of Europe it is better to begin with those of 
England, — Lincoln, and Ely, and Peterborough, and 
Durham, and Lichfield, and Canterbury, and Salisbury, 
and Exeter, and AV'inchester, and Wells, all of which 
are worth a visit, and many others. It is better to 
begin with these English cathedrals and enjoy them 
while one may; for, with all their impressive splendor 
to our unaccustomed Puritan eyes, they come to look 
empty and bare and cold after one has once felt the 
sensuous glories of the churches of Southern Europe. 
The beauty of these Northern churches is too severely 
intellectual in contrast with the warmth and rich color 
of the South. Coming back from there, one feels the 
nakedness of the stern gray cathedrals of England 
and longs for the Madonnas and bright coloring of Italy, 
the ascending incense, the burning lamps and warm {)ic- 
tures, the family altars, the noble armies of saints, the 
marble flight of pure white angels, — thousands and thou- 
sands of them, — and the splendor of the trembling altar 
with its sacred lights flaming over silver and precious 
stones. 

To tell the truth, although our Church-of-England 
friends never quite like to hear it, these great cathedrals 
of theirs were built by the Roman Catholic Church. 
They belong, with all their splendors, to it, with all its 
defects. Their present use is unsympathetic and an an- 
achronism. Robbed of their saints and swinging cen- 
sers, their beautiful idols and graven images and poly- 
theistic chapels, they are a cold void. For the present 
Church-of-England service they have little more special 
ap2)ropriateness than has a Greek temple. And so 



24 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

it has come to pass that in some of them the choir is 
inclosed from floor to roof on all sides, and fashioned 
into a new Protestant church within the old cathe- 
dral, conformed to the exigencies of the" modern 
worship. 

For the American stranger, to whom the outside of 
the Old World is all a poem, York is a delightful old 
town just to wander through alone and at will. It is 
full of quaint and ancient little streets, overhanging 
houses, antiquated stone seats and remains, odd nooks 
and corners that have come down from the Middle Ages. 
In all its streets you read the legend of Roman and 
Saxon and Dane and Norman and Puritan. On its 
walls you see the Plantagenet and Tudor emblems. At 
one sweep in a few hours in York you may find Roman 
altars and coffins and forgotten household gods, Saxon 
monuments, Norman fortifications, the poor dwellings 
of the people in mediaeval times, Elizabethan manors, 
and the unimpressive because familiar building of our 
own day. 

York was once the northern metropolis of England, 
a centre of fashion and political life, and dividing eccle- 
siastical power with Canterbury and London at a time 
when ecclesiasticism was the force of the realm. Now 
the railways have drawn all that to London, and York is 
a quiet, easy-going old cathedral city, eminently respect- 
able, aristocratic, and rather sleepy. As a social study I 
have no doubt it is interesting and worth investigation, 
but it was not my fortune to know it save from the out- 
side. A cathedral city is itself an order of life and 
society unknown tons, and which it would take a novel 
to reveal. 

There are three clubs in York, and they show how 
the lines are drawn. One, and the leading, the York- 
shire, is for " county gentlemen" ; the York is for 
'^ city professional gentlemen" ; while the third and last, 
the City, is for " tradesmen." 

York, with a population of fifty thousand, and the 



SHOTTERY. 25 

capital of the largest county in England, — Yorkshire, — 
covering a population of about two and a half millions 
of souls, has just three iceekly newspapers. 

It is an English town from top to bottom, old- 
fashioned, comfortable, dignified, and satisfied with it- 
self. There is nothing in our land with which to con- 
trast it or run a parallel. There is probably no way in 
which a stranger would get a better inside conception 
of English provincial life of a high order than by living 
for a few weeks in York ; and if one were fatigued or 
exhausted by the wear and tear of the ocean, it would 
be an excellent and profitable resting-place. 

York, England 



CHAPTER III. 



SHOTTERY. 

Anne Hatheway's Cottage as it stands To-day — A Farm 
Village — Shakespeare's Love in the Thatched Cot- 
tage — The Local Affection for the Story. 

I HAVE walked to-day from here to the neighboring 
village of Shottery to see the cottage where Anne Hathe- 
way lived and where Shakespeare won her. It was a 
charming bit of representative English scenery, that 
landscape and view so unlike our own, and yet so 
familiar through literature and tradition that it always 
seems to me as if I had seen it before in dreams or some 
previous condition of existence. I followed a footpath 
across the fields, with old-fashioned stiles at every fence 
and hawthorn hedges along the lanes, — the very path 
trod by Shakespeare in his quest of Anne. Tradition 
does not say how often he had to walk it. 

The cottage, a quaint, straw-thatched building < ov- 
B 3 



26 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

ered with ivy and rose-bushes, is in a good state of 
preservation. The old house, which was, for its time, 
commodious and of some pretensions, is now occupied 
by three families, — farm laborers. The central divis- 
ion, which is formed of the hall and main fireplace, and 
the sittin2:-room of the old buildincr as it stood in 
Shakespeare's time, is now known as the Hatheway 
cottage, and is kept much as it stood then, with some 
of tlie old furniture and heirlooms of the family. An 
elderly woman, with the pleasant manners of the hum- 
ble classes here, received me, and showed a real and in- 
telligent interest in explaining the legend and relics of 
the place. In answer to a question, she told me she 
was herself a Hatheway, and that her family had lived 
on the spot ever since the time of Shakespeare, as well 
as for generations before. 

Although the exterior of the house is of humble ap- 
pearance, the Hatheway family must have been of the 
better sort in their days. The room where Shakespeare 
made love — or where Anne made love to him, as a 
somewhat cynical and mature damsel of the place, who 
seemed to look on my walk to Shottery parish as a 
kind of mild lunacy, informed me — is a large room, 
some fifteen feet square, handsomely panelled in oak. 
It is flagged with broad stones, worn smooth by the 
steps of generations, looking rude to us, but which was 
the comfortable custom of the time. The 2:reat feature 
of the room is the wide, old-fashioned chimney-place, 
in which you can sit, and sitting look up through to 
the sky. In the left wing of this capacious fireplace, 
as you face it, there is cut or built in the wall the 
bacon-closet, still serving that homely use for the 
Hatheways of 1880. On the right side stands the 
" courtin'-settle,'' as my old friend phrased it, a very 
rude wooden bench, some five feet long, with back and 
low arms. This seat my guide was sure was the real 
and veritable place which did the work, and carried the 
Hatheway family into legend and history. On it sat 



1 



SH OTTER Y. 27 

at the time of my visit a young girl of sixteen, sewing 
some homely work, — a Hatheway without a Shakespeare. 

Up a narrow and humble Avooden stairway you reach 
the half-story rooms, which are now and were in the 
sixteenth century the sleeping- apartments of the family. 
The bedstead, the central feature, is further evidence of 
the substantial standing of the family. It is hand- 
somely carved with scroll-Avork and human figures; 
some of them resembling the grotesque carving seen in 
ancient cathedrals. This work appears, by its style and 
class, to date about four hundred years ago. The bed has 
been in the Hatheway family ever since their name be- 
came a matter of interest, and is believed by them to have 
been used for generations before. It is not in use now, 
and is furnished with very heavy and soft linen, woven 
in the family, and hemmed with wonderful elaboration. 
This, too, an heirloom from more prosperous times. In 
this bedroom is a spinning-wheel seat, alleged to have 
been immortalized by Shakespeare, but the good dame 
would not give the passage by which his kindly re- 
membrance had carried the homely object into literature. 

This room, the old state bedroom of the family, 
like its adjoining mate, the present sleeping-apartment 
of the house, is so low that you touch the ceiling every- 
where except in the centre, and the joists and rafters 
are joined together not by nails but by wooden pegs. 

The Hatheways of Shakespeare's time were " yeo- 
men,'' a class of British society that has pretty much 
disappeared. The people who live in their cottage to- 
day are farm-laborers, a class so poor and ignorant and 
hopeless of any future that we happily have no equiv- 
alent to it in the United States. This fact accounts for 
much of the contrast between the substance and com- 
fort indicated by these relics and traditions of the past 
and the meagreness and poverty of the family to-day. 
It makes this humble cottage, also, an instructive illus- 
tration of a very unsatisfactory change that has been 
going on in the lower order of English society. 



28 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

Visitors, the Hatheway dowager informed me, came 
often, but not so many in these hard times as in years 
before. The Americans, she said, were " the best;" and 
to my inquiry as to what was best, she said they took 
most interest and seemed most pleased. I was pretty 
sure my hostess took me for an American prince, and 
so, noblesse oblige, gave her a shilling, where I think a 
sixpence was the usual gratuity. This modest British 
coin brought me a shower of blessings and kind wishes, 
and, wdiat was more practical, some snowdrops and 
'' rosemary for remembrance'^ from the garden. Indeed, 
the real gratitude which a shilling given to a decent 
man or woman in this land always evokes is sad evi- 
dence of the narrow margin of existence here. Life is 
a struggle, and the poor go into it burdened and handi- 
capped almost beyond hope. 

In the modest garden of the cottage, planted with 
box, lavender, marigold, rosemary, pansy, thyme, and 
other familiar English flowers and shrubs, stands the 
well of pure cold water, in the same place and serving the 
same homely uses as of old. It is doubtful, however, if 
Shakespeare ever drank of it. The Englishman of the 
sixteenth century, like the Englishman of the nine- 
teenth, I suppose, confined himself to ale. 

In my walk across-fields from Stratford-on-Avon to 
Shottery, the footpath of course often diverged, and I 
was forced to inquire of those I met the way. I was 
much struck with the familiar knowledge of all with 
the story of Shakespeare's love, and their simple pride 
in it. In other localities where there were famous 
churches, in which good knights and old earls famous in 
history lay buried, I have often inquired of respectable- 
looking people and found them ignorant of or only half 
acquainted with the great historic features of these 
places. In Warwick, for instance, I found several 
Avorthy people who seemed to know nothing of the 
great Earl of Leicester, and not to care much whether 
his body was in their church or not. All around Shot- 



SUOTTERY. 29 

tery, however, the name of Anne Hatheway was a 
household word and the humble thatched cottage a 
shrine. Some rude farm-laborers, who spoke so thickly 
I could hardly understand them, and used language so 
provincial as not to seem English to American ears, 
and some bright little boys hardly twelve years old, 
alike gave intelligent answers, showed a friendly sym- 
pathy in my quest, and seemed to think my pilgrimage 
the right and proper and natural thing to do. 

This is " Shakespeare land." The town lives and 
moves and has its being in his memory and tradition. 
His body lies buried here in a beautiful and stately 
edifice, — a noble shrine to which the culture and genius 
of the world come to worship; the house in which he 
was born has been carefully and faithfully restored, 
and is held in honorable trust for the use and devotion 
of posterity ; the dwelling in which he died is set apart 
from common uses, and is to be the site of a grand 
memorial monument ; but the hearts of this people go 
out in simple love and affection to the little cottage 
where he loved, even though historic gossip suggests 
and calm reflection convinces one that the passionate 
fascination of a boy of eighteen for an innocent crea- 
ture of twenty-six was not a purely idyllic romance. 

I am staying here at the Red Horse Inn, a house 
which has the enviable distinction of having its adver- 
tisement drawn by Washington Irving. He introduced 
it into American literature in his first letters from Eng- 
land, and it has ever since enjoyed a rich custom of 
American travel, and is worthy of it. Irving, long 
years ago, wrote with grateful feeling of its good cheer, 
its solid comforts, its homelike domesticity, its honest 
wines, and its pretty waiting-maids, and the house keeps 
up well its reputation in all these essential points. Of 
the inns of England suffice it to say that, while some- 
what expensive as compared with our hotels, they are 
a delightful experience in life which I fear we shall 



30 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

never have in our country. Neither our landlords are 
solid and unassuming enough to give them nor our 
people sensible enough to demand and have them. I 
have tried three now, — the Craven Arms, at Coventry, 
the Warwick Arms, at Warwick, and the classic Red 
Horse here, — and understand the reason of their affec- 
tionate remembrance in English literature. 
Steatford-on-Avon. 



CHAPTER ly. 

READING IN BERKSHIRE. 

Eeadin"g or England and Eeading of Pennsylvania — 
Comparative Picture of Two County Towns — Blood is 
Stronger than Water. 

Reading of England, like the familiar Reading of 
our Pennsylvania, is the capital town of the county of 
Berks, here often called Berkshire, — the shire or shriev- 
alty of Berks. The two towns are almost about the 
same size, — 42,000 to 45,000 inhabitants. Reading of 
England figures in the directories at 27,000, but the 
town of Early, which is built into it so that the stranger 
cannot tell in which municipal corporation he may be, 
is substantially and popularly a part of Reading, and 
brings its population up to the figures of its New-World 
namesake. 

England's Berks County has a population of 196,475, 
and an acreage of 450,132 acres. The Pennsylvania 
Berks has a population of something over 100,000, and 
an acreage something over 600,000 acres. They are 
near enough to make a parallel have some interest. 

Politically, all comparison ceases. Berks of Penn- 
sylvania, with its Reading in it, sends one member to 
the House of Representatives of the United States, and 



READING IN BERKSHIRE. 31 

sends hira by male or manhood suffrage, every male 
citizen of age and not convicted of an infamous offence 
having an equal voice in the selection of the repre- 
sentative. The Berkshire of Eno;land, with only 7741 
legal votes, sends to the House of the Commons of the 
United Kingdom three members, two of whom are 
Conservatives and one Liberal ; while Readingtown in 
its own right, on a registry of 4721 votes, sends two 
more members, both of whom are in this Parliament 
Liberals. Then Abingdon, wn'th 890 votes, Walling- 
ford, with 1204 votes, and Windsor, with 2054 votes, 
all boroughs in the same county, send one member each, 
two of whom are Conservatives and one Liberal. Eight 
members, therefore, are sent from the county of Berks, 
and, as it may often happen under the peculiar British 
system of voting and representation, they are exactly 
divided as to party. Berks County, therefore, pairs 
itself in the House of Commons. I write of the 
House which expired in 1880. 

The county is represented in the upper house by all 
its peers, be they one or twenty. It is to be said, how- 
ever, for the honor of the peers, that its mem here when 
sitting as legislators rise above sectional or local feelings 
and sit for the whole country, — i.e., when that does not 
conflict with their sitting for their own class. I am 
glad of the opportunity to make this political contrast, 
for it is only by such pictures that one can set forth the 
wide differences of detail in the practical politics of the 
two countries. 

The Reading I write from is a very ancient site. It 
emerges in a shadowy way out of the night of history, 
and first appears in recorded tradition as Redinges, 
which has very naturally softened into Reading. The 
Danes and Saxons fought around here one thousand 
years ago. King Alfred the Great once or more visited 
the spot. Parliaments of England sat here when the 
Parliament was a peripatetic and experimental institu- 
tion, wandering around as our own Continental Congress 



32 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

once did through York and Lancaster and Philadelphia. 
Archbishop Laud and John Bunyan were familiar with 
its streets. An old King Henry, about 1100, founded 
for it a magnificent abbey to house and accommodate 
two hundred Benedictine monks, — the same fortunate 
fellows who once enjoyed the historic cloisters of West- 
minster Abbey and were a great order in England. 
The stately ruins of this grand old abbey, artistically 
clad in fresh and neatly-kept ivy, jealously guarded 
from decay on the one hand or too perfect restoration 
on the other, are now the pride and glory of the Reading 
of to-day. It is, in truth, a very striking and vener- 
able pile. The great old walls, with gates and arch- 
ways and massive works still standing in the rough 
outline of hall and chapel and cloister, are quite re- 
markable in their composition, the masonry resembling 
that natural conglomerate formation of rock popularly 
known as pudding-stone. The huge walls in front have 
been built entirely of pebbles or bowlders of a hard, 
smoky crystal or quartz, imbedded in some kind of 
mortar, which formed the whole into one solid mass. 

These are the things which old Reading has in advan- 
tage over our new Reading. And these legacies of the 
past are not only a wealth of tradition and legend and 
inspiring associations, but a substantial material bequest 
of brick and mortar. Her churches, her public build- 
ings, her roads, — in part at least, — come down to her as 
the gift of previous generations. This is the advantage 
which every English town has over us, and it is a great 
one. 

These things apart, there is a strong similarity be- 
tween the two towns, — the Readings of England and 
Pennsylvania. In both the houses are solid, comfort- 
able, respectable, — the dwellings of a substantial mid- 
dle class of people. In both the streets are spacious 
and fairly well kept. In both brick is the predomi- 
nating material of structure, and in both there is a dis- 
tinctly visible new and old order of building. The 



READING IN BERKSHIRE. 33 

pavements of the Pennsylvania Reading are roomier 
than those here, and the accommodations for travellers 
on a larger scale. Although three railways run into 
or through the place, there does not seem to be much 
travel, and consequently little provision for it. The 
business of Reading is largely as a distributing centre 
for Berks County, which comes in and goes out the 
same day, while the nobility and upper classes rarely 
have occasion to use a country hotel, visiting at one an- 
other's houses. These facts, of course, limit the neces- 
sity of providing for travel. I am staying at the tradi- 
tional county-house, a good old English inn, which, 
although comfortable and excellent in its way, is quite 
primitive and thoroughly provincial. Our Reading is 
quite ^^ smarter.'^ 

It is to be said further for this Reading that its best 
does not show on the outside. The nobility and landed 
gentry, of course, eschew a town and spend their large 
means in building country establishments, which, being 
seated in the heart of vast estates, are out of sight even 
from the high-roads. The presence of this class in the 
town is seen only in an occasional drag on the streets, 
or the " boxes'' and ponies and coroneted equipages 
and heavily-built hunters which indicate the neigh- 
borhood of gentlemen's stables. Were all the houses 
of the wealthier people of our Reading to be with- 
drawn from its town limits, it would lower the level of 
the appearance of the place very greatly. 

The environs of the town here are for this season 
very beautiful and attractive. As you pass along the 
road you catch continuous glimpses of homes of ease 
and elegance and refinement hidden in the trees or 
nestling quietly and warmly in the midst of broad and 
abounding acres, golden now with wheat, and bordered 
by thorn-hedges red and fragrant with roses. 

This Reading of England, like ours, is also some- 
what famous for its breweries, — its fountains of beer. 
It has, too, noted iron-works, a fairly gigantic biscuit- 



34 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

factory known all over the kingdom, and other manu- 
factories, and has become quite a centre of the seed 
trade in England. In fact, this trade is the most conspic- 
uous in this place, the seed depot of the main house in 
the business being an enormous affair entirely dispro- 
portionate in size to anything else in the town. Being 
on the junction of the Thames with another small 
stream, this Reading has also some shipping and fishing 
interests, which our town has not, and the Oxford stu- 
dents comedown to it often in racing- and boating-par- 
ties. The boating is, indeed, quite a feature of the 
place, giving a distinct local color to the town. 

Anglican Reading, finally, has a park with which, I 
suppose, our younger town cannot compete. It is not 
large, but speaks well for the cultivation and aesthetic 
advancement of the people. Its laying out evinces a 
thorough acquaintance with the best principles of land- 
scape-gardening, and fully doubles its apparent size 
and all its uses. Its treasures of ornament are quite 
effective, — wonderful old trees always the centres of 
little systems of walks, a grim, black cannon, " cap- 
tured at Sevastapol,'^ fountains and basin grass-plots 
relieved with rare flowers and exotic foliage, and, last 
and best, the crowning feature to which all avenues 
finally lead you, that stately old abbey, with its royal 
ivy and arched vistas, and scattered fragments and 
capitals, and the stone sarcophagus, and all the " prop- 
erties,^^ in fine, which any well-regulated, picturesque 
old English abbey should have. 

Like our own Reading, this one, too, rests in a mag- 
nificent background of generous farms and agricultural 
wealth. The good cheer of the country is everywhere 
visible, — in the fruiting-fields, in the warm, rubicund 
faces of the burghers, in the heavy, well-fed horses, 
and in the general well-to-do and contented look of 
everything and everybody. The farms of Berkshire 
are reputed through England, and the famous Berk- 
shire pigs are known to breeders the world over. In 



READING IN BERKSHIRE. 35 

the old country, as in the new, the county of Berks 
is the solid foundation of Reading city. 

This Reading has just three weekly newspapers and 
none daily. Compare this with the vigor and energy 
and journalistic excellence of the large press of Amer- 
ican Reading, daily, weekly, and monthly, and you 
know which country you are in. 

To trace this parallel between these two towns of 
our two countries, although starting in the accidental 
point of similarity of name, has been very interesting 
to me, and I trust will be equally so to some of my 
readers. The two people are very much alike; their 
dwellings are similar; their ways and habits of living 
about the same, even, notwithstanding the strong in- 
fusion of Germanic blood into the human stream of 
our Reading. But what is that again but the repeti- 
tion in modern times, and on a small scale, of the an- 
cient race history of England ? The two towns repre- 
sent also the substantial middle-class population of 
both counties, and it is interesting and instructive to 
observe that like conditions of life, or nearly like, pro- 
duce on both sides of the water about the same results, 
notwithstanding the great differences of politics, gov- 
ernment, and social structure which exist between us. 
It is evidence of our common blood and race, — a blood 
that goes back of modern history and takes in German 
as well as English stock. 

Keading, England. 



36 ENGLISH TOWNS. 



CHAPTER Y. 

LANCASTER. 

Two Towns in the Old World and the New — Tracing 
THE Lineaments of the Pennsylvania Town in the 
Blood and Soil of England — English Electoral System 
— Voters with Three or more Votes — The Celtic Tinge 
— A Missing Link — The Old Time Colonial Lancas- 
ter of Pennsylvania fresh in England Yet. 

Pennsylvania, in her State nomenclature, bears 
perpetual testimony to the affectionate remembrance in 
which the early English settlers ever held their old 
country, keeping green in the names of the new land 
the memory of the old homes they should see no more 
in this world. The extent and detail in which this has 
been done is quite remarkable, although it often escapes 
notice until it is forced on one's attention by finding 
in a strange land place after place with the old familiar 
names. This systematic reproduction sometimes ahnost 
makes the new land seem like a shadow of the old. 

There are here a Carlisle town, '' on which the sun 
shines fair," which is the county-seat of Cumberland ; 
a Peading, the county-seat of Berkshire ; a Lancaster, 
the county-town of Lancashire ; a York, the county- 
town of Yorkshire; a Chester, the cathedral city of 
Cheshire; a Huntingdon, in Huntingdon County ; and 
a Bedford, in Bedford County. There are a Bucks 
County, a Montgomery County, a Westmoreland County, 
a Northampton County, a Somerset County, a North- 
umberland County ; and in detached towns and villages, 
streams, townships, and so on, one might run the list 
out indefinitely. 

In this Lancaster from which I write one can 
trace the family relationship even to minuter detail. 



LANCASTER. 37 

There are here from old a King Street and a Queen 
Street and a Little Duke Street, and St. Mary's, James', 
High, Market, Water, Ann, Church, and Middle 
Streets. Our Prince Street is here Prince Regent 
Street. There are a St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church 
and a Phoenix Foundry, which may, for aught I know, 
be the parent of our Phoenixville Iron-Works. 

England's Lancaster, like Pennsylvania's, is a town 
of something over twenty thousand people and the 
centre of a Lancaster County, but between the two 
counties there is no parallel. England's Lancashire has 
nearly three millions of population. It is relatively 
one of the largest counties of England, having an acre- 
age of one million two hundred and eight thousand 
acres. During this century it has become the centre 
of the cotton trade, and cities like Manchester and 
Liverpool, with their hundreds of thousands of inhab- 
itants, have sprung up within its borders, but little 
Lancaster town, with its old church and castle and the 
prestige of its Roman camp, is still the historic county- 
town, the seat of its dignity and honor. England 
rather looks down on new-made wealth unconsecrated 
by religion, learning, blood, or traditions of arms. 

Although a place of perhaps several thousand inhab- 
itants less than our Pennsylvania town, this Lancaster 
presents a much more imposing appearance. It is built 
entirely of stone, giving it a very solid and substantial 
air, while the tints of the stone, grays of every hue, 
produce a much handsomer effect than anything that 
could be gotten from bricks. The central view from 
the old Main Street, looking up the rising slope of the 
hill, covered with quaint gables and buttressed walls, 
and finally culminating in the castellated masses of 
John of Gaunt's great tower, is one of the finer pic- 
tures of interior England, and architecturally quite 
striking. It is an irregular town of narrow streets, 
rambling up and down hills of even steeper grade than 
those of our own Lancaster, and plunging every now 

4 



38 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

and then into dark and dingy hollows that are more 
picturesque than reputable. It is^ however, very 
reasonably free, for England, from beggary and want, 
and its approaches to the country are generally through 
pleasant lanes lined with comfortable cottages or small 
houses festooned with flowers, and each with its little 
garden of green grass or foliage presenting a pleasing 
picture of comfort and modest refinement. 

It was on a market morning I came to Lancaster, 
and the look of things was very familiar. King Street 
was lined with unhorsed wagons and carts and vehicles 
of all kinds from the country. In the large, spacious 
courts or interior yards of the inns were throngs of 
people surging out into the streets and back again. In 
the stalls and tap-rooms the men were gathered, talking 
and selling and buying ; in the stores and shops, the 
womeu. Farther down into the town the scene be- 
came more distinctly English and provincial, the market 
shifting into a kind of fair, — noisy, cheap, and rough. 
Here all kinds of things were being sold at vendue, 
half a dozen rude auctioneers standino; almost with 
their backs to each other, each with a barrel covered 
with a sheet-iron plate as his stand or counter. All of 
them cried their wares at the top of their voices, and 
pounded with a hammer on the iron plates in order to 
emphasize their yelling. The music was Wagneresque. 
It was a simple realistic opera that told very w^ell the 
story of rustic England. Nevertheless, through all 
this din and disorderly noise the transfer of property, 
after a fashion, went pretty rapidly on. The things 
sold were small wares of a cheap kind, — rough china, 
tin, ready-made clothing. Everything was rude, petty, 
and humble. 

One touch of local color which I certainly thought 
to have come on here is conspicuously wanting. I had 
surely expected to see again in this ancient Lancaster 
the " Red Lion,'' and the " Leopard,'' and the '' Black 
Bear," and the '' White Swan," and the ^' Cross-Keys," 



I 



LANCASTER. 39 

and " The Grapes/' all in goodly state with substantial 
coaches in front of them, and sanded floors, and bur- 
nished pewter, and warm welcome, and good cheer in- 
side, but they are not here. Nor did I find any inn 
signs or names at all in the old place which have sur- 
vived in the new, — a missing link in the chain of suc- 
cession which seems rather singular. 

The most marked contrast between the two Lancas- 
ters is the entire absence here of any Teutonic element. 
The place is very English, with even less trace of the 
Saxon than in most parts of England. Lancaster has 
very sensibly felt the influence of the Celtic settlement 
to the north, south, and west of it, — Scotland, Wales, 
and Ireland, — and you see this blood-stamp clearly in 
the forms and structure of the people, especially in the 
women, who have more of the French and Irish race 
characteristics of feature and movement than any I 
have met in any part of England. This was easily dis- 
tinguishable both in the farmers' daughters in the mar- 
kets and in the faces and carriage of the townswomen 
whom I saw in church. There was a distinctly warmer 
coloring of hair, a greater elasticity of step and fluency 
of motion, than belongs to the average English M^oman 
of other sections of the land. Being the last strong- 
hold against the Danes and Saxons and invading 
Northmen of all kinds coming in from the east, it is 
but natural that this northwest quarter of England 
should retain most strongly the blood and features of 
the earliest races. 

From the time of the Wars of the Roses, Lancashire 
has always been a place noted for its political activity, 
and just now it is in active motion, organizing already 
for the next Parliamentary election. At present it 
sends a strongly Conservative delegation to Parliament, 
notwithstanding the radical leaning of such places as 
Manchester and Liverpool and Preston, a manufactur- 
ing town of one hundred thousand. The county, apart 
from these towns, sends eight members, all Conserva- 



40 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

tive, two of whom are in the Cabinet. Preston sends 
two Conservatives, Liverpool two Conservatives and one 
Liberal, and Manchester two Liberals and one Con- 
servative, these latter two great towns just pairing off 
each other's influence. The voting list of Lancashire, 
when all the districts are footed up, seems pretty high, 
but it must be remembered that under the English sys- 
tem one man may easily cast three votes, or even more. 
For instance, in Lancashire, a man living in Preston 
or Liverpool might easily have three votes, thus : 

1. If in his town he is a registered property-owner 
or rent-payer, he has a vote there. This is the first, 
and, according to English feeling, the lower grade of 
franchise. The man votes as one average, industrious, 
respectable subject of the kingdom. 

2. If this same man is of a county family, owning 
estates in the county, he may also vote on the county 
list. Here he votes his family birth and historic con- 
nection with the kingdom. 

3. If this same voter, who has already cast two 
legitimate votes, is an educated man, he may vote again 
on the registry list of his university, which sends its 
members to Parliament. Here he votes his education. 

Lastly, as far as he may be able to influence or assist 
in the appointment of a bishop, he also votes again, the 
bishops being lords, who sit in the upper House. 

It is this delicately-adopted system of the representa- 
tion of interests, of birth, of education, of religion, of 
classes, of labor, of money, etc., which makes all mere 
figures so deceptive and illusory in treating of English 
politics. The English statesman resents the mathe- 
matical basis of representation as being merely an 
averaging and levelling process. 

English Lancaster has just three weekly newspapers. 
Here, as in the case of Reading, our Pennsylvania 
towns so far outstrip their old-country parents that any 
comparison is out of the question. It is the same way 
in old Carlisle, which, with a population of thirty- 



LANCASTER. 41 

five thousand, publishes only weekly journals, and but 
three of them. 

Our young Lancaster of the New World — if you 
will subtract from it all the presence and influence of 
the great German blood, whicli it could so ill do with- 
out — is a pretty fair reproduction of this old town. 
That is the only marked difference. You do not hear 
a grateful German word here, or see the trace of a 
single Germanic custom, usage, or tradition. 

There are no great barns here ; no red-faced farmer 
boys with their shining buggies and well-fed horses in 
the streets ; no staid and decorous Mennonite elders 
with solid and prosperous air; no German books or 
papers or almanacs in the shop- windows ; none and 
nothing of tliat honest, strong, and historic race which 
has contributed so much to the wealth and glory of our 
Lancaster County, and which is now perhaps its better 
half, — only their English cousins of like manner and 
degree. You find here fresh and in clear outline the 
Lancaster of our young past ; the Lancaster that clus- 
tered around the old-fashioned court-house ; the Lan- 
caster of old King and Queen and Duke Streets ; the 
Lancaster of the Old Bar and of the country '^ manors" 
of gone times ; the Lancaster that used to come in from 
Carnarvon and Coleraine and Little Britain and the 
" lower end ;" the Lancaster of the Yates and Cun- 
ninghams and I^ardners and Montgomerys and Frank- 
lyns and Jenkins and Bartons laid away in their family 
graves forever. Here it is, drinking port and sitting 
in stately old Windsor chairs and burning wax tapers 
and swearing at dignified butlers and powdered foot- 
men yet. 

In their respective relation to the adjacent country 
there is a strono; resemblance between the two Lancas- 
ters. Lancaster of England -is situated on the pleasing 
river Lune, which, when the tide is out, is nearly as 
respectable a stream as our Conestoga Creek ; when the 
tide is in it is something larger. While the county of 

4^ 



42 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

Lancashire is distinctively known as a cotton-spinning 
district, that portion of it which lies immediately 
around Lancaster town and forms its beautiful setting 
is a fine, rich agricultural sweep of land rolling pretty 
much as do the farm-fields from Lancaster to Millers- 
ville, in Pennsylvania. It looks rather richer and 
more bountiful than our land, because the generous 
green of the meadows and fields is not broken by the 
arid lines of dusty roads and dry fences. The sweep 
around this Lancaster is one broad field of living green, 
the various divisions of property marked only by the 
darker olive shades of the hedges. The roads are nar- 
row and deep, and so hedged by hawthorns and box 
and bushes as to be hardly seen, and not at all to break 
the picture of the landscape. 

Altogether, there is quite a family resemblance be- 
tween the two towns, — their people and life. There is 
the same size, the same equable comfort and rest and 
substance, — the golden mean of blessing. The general 
features of every-day life — on the outside and out of 
doors at least — are much the same. There is a reason- 
able distribution of wealth among the people of both 
towns, and a comparative freedom from want. 

Lancaster of England — with its solid structures of 
stone ; its fine gray tints unbroken by the glare of red 
brick or white paint ; its old-fashioned domestic houses, 
with quaint armorial bearings or scriptural legends 
carved above the doorways ; with its venerable walls 
and gateways clad with ivy and lichens ; with its famous 
round castle, which has 

" Oft rolled back the tide of war," 

and from whose parapets surly cannon are even now 
trained on the peaceful fields ; with its mediaeval legacies 
of dungeon and keep ; with its authentic traditions of 
Roman empire ; with its towers and turrets and spires 
of modern time and use ; with the British soldiery of 



LANCASTER. 43 

to-day, brilliant in scarlet and gold, filing through its 
streets to the calls of drum and bugle; with its local 
peasant dialect, unintelligible to American ears, and the 
clang of the wooden shoe — is by far the more pictu- 
resque and impressive of the two j)laces. 

Lancaster of Pennsylvania, however, has solid ad- 
vantages over the older city. She has already public 
buildings far bevond those of this town at the same ao;e. 
Give the Lancaster of the New World one thousand 
years more and I doubt not she will be a greater city 
than even this one, and in tradition, already in her in- 
fancy, has she not the names of Muhlenberg and Mifflin 
and Fulton and Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens, — men 
as great and historical as any of the heroes of the Wars 
of the Roses ? She was for a brief space, in times of 
turmoil, also the capital of the nation, a seat of govern- 
ment just as respectable as the court of Henry IV., 
which for a short time was held here. 

And to-day, in many of those things which mark the 
strength of this century, — in new^spapers, in schools, in 
broad streets, in commodious pavements, in spacious 
hotels, in fine stores and the goods in them, — our Penn- 
sylvania town is far ahead of its respectable old English 
parent. The glory of this Lancaster lies in its past : 
ours is yet to come. 

There is one fact forces itself on one in drawing this 
parallel between the two towns from the old home site 
which is rather strange and somewhat sad. The name 
of our new Lancaster, the establishing it as the seat of 
a county of Lancaster, the naming of the streets after 
the old ones even to the detail of rank. King and 
Queen and Prince being the great streets here and the 
others mentioned minor ones, — all force the conclusion 
that our American Lancaster was laid out by English- 
men of Lancashire, who lovingly traced in the soil of 
the New World the very lines and features of their old 
home. Yet in the county paper of to-day, on the signs 
of the shops in the streets, on the mouldering and 



44 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

sunken tombs and gravestones In the old churchyards, 
I have not found a single one of the old colonial family 
names of the Lancaster of Penn. Literally, " the places 
that once knew them know them no more." 
Lancaster, England. 



CHAPTER YI. 

OXFORD. 

An Idyllic Seat or Learning and Conseryatism — Citri- 
ous Superstitious Survivals — Historical Development 
OF THE Modern College — The American and the Eng- 
lish College — Ecclesiastical Oxford — The Martyrs — 
An Old-Fashioned English Country Inn and Eour-in- 
Hand Travel — Gentleman-Coaching in England — A 
County Institution. 

" A citie seated riche in everye tliinge, 
Girt with woocle and water." 

Oxford — the ford where, in old Saxon times, the 
oxen crossed the river, and now the ford where, for five 
hundred years, England's youth have crossed a greater 
stream — is a charming picture of rest and sylvan beauty, 
— an academic idyl. It is a picturesque old place of 
that medisevo-ecclesiastical architecture, half religious, 
half military, which tells so impressively the story of 
its day ; a town of towers and turrets and spires ; of 
ancient walls and buttresses and quaint gargoyles; of 
glorious stained-glass windows, oriel and rose and 
arched and Catharine; of lovely academic garden- 
parks ; of quadrangles and chapels and cloisters for 
the monks of letters; of forgotten bastions and re- 
doubts, and long, stern walls with battlemented walks, 
now peacefully crumbling under ivy and roses; of 
stately oaks and beeches, and grand old trees venerable 
with moss and lichen and tenderly watched and cared 



OXFORD. 45 

for in their green old age ; of Gothic arches and gate- 
ways and falling ruins ; of wooded walks and gentle 
waters ; of smooth, soft meadows, all shaven and shorn, 
" and fields of living green ;" of noble bits of forest, 
carefully tended and stocked with antlered tenants ; 
of prisons of the martyrs and precious altars where, in 
flame and fire, they won their crowns ; of crosses and 
statues of great men and good women and strange 
beasts, grotesque symbolic images in stone ; of quiet 
churchyards and chiming bells and peaceful graves ; 
of gray stone and clinging green and ancient gables ; 
of scented gardens filled with old-fashioned English 
flowers with homely Saxon names ; of rustic inns ; of 
classic streams and time-stained halls consecrated by the 
traditions of faith and learning, and hallowed with the 
names and memories of the great and good of England. 

" Were ever river-banks so fair, 
Gardens so fit for nightingales, as these? 
Was ever town so rich in court and tower?" 

When the American college graduate sees all this 
wealth of culture and of the tradition and legend of 
learning which is lavished so generously on the founda- 
tions of scholarship here, he feels sharply the bareness 
and poverty of the surroundings of our best academic 
life. The English student, even if he never studies much, 
may get unconsciously, almost by absorption, a generous 
education. His training, apart from the tuition of the 
schools, is liberalizing and humane, for he enters at once 
in his daily life and being into the fellowship of cen- 
turies of learning and intellectual dower. It is his in- 
heritance. 

I think no American alumnus will ever visit an 
English university without a feeling of poignant regret 
for the opportunities which have not been his and a 
vain instinctive Avish that he might be born again. 
But it is not fair to compare our young American col- 
leges with the English school, the heir of all the ages 



46 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

of Anglo-Saxon culture, piety, and intellectual growth. 
Not only are they separated by centuries of care and 
sacrifice and endowment, but to-day they represent 
different conditions of society, and different stages in 
the development of history and education. 

Nor would it be wise for an American student to 
take his full academic course in an English university, 
however superior the advantage and pleasure as far as 
scholarship and cultivation are concerned. The friend- 
ships one makes at college will largely influence and 
control his future life, and for Americans this associa- 
tion should be American. An American boy who 
studies at a foreign school simply expatriates himself 
for life. He comes home a stranger in his own land. 

I would, however, strongly advise every college- 
bred man of our country who is yet within, say, five 
or six years of his graduation to complete and finish 
his course by a year at Cambridge or Oxford. Such 
one year of post-graduate study will sum up and round 
off all that has gone before, and in the way of broad- 
ening thought and widening the range of his intellec- 
tual activities double the value of all the years of his 
American cursus. Even one day in Oxford or Cam- 
bridge will yield a rich return to a trained mind from 
our schools. The acquaintance made, too, df English 
and continental young men — men who will rise to power 
and influence in foreign nations — will always extend 
one's power and influence at home if he can make 
them available from a wide basis of home acquaint- 
ance. 

If, however, one must be restricted to a single course 
of a few brief years, for an American the American 
college, with all its barrenness, its lack of refinement, 
its poverty of intellectual wealth, is the proper place. 
The two schools represent different stages of society, 
and the progress of learning and the education of the 
American college will, on the whole, best answer the 
present demands of American life, social and political. 



OXFORD. 47 

Education, in our Anglo-Saxon times, has so far de- 
veloped three grand stages or epochs: 

I. The monk and the convent represent the first stage 
of learning in our modern civilization, or renewal of lost 
civilizations. During this period education was a mo- 
nopoly, held strictly and exclusively within the control 
of the Church. This was the medieval period. Edu- 
cation was shut up in the cloister. The very word 
daustrum describes it. 

II. Next comes the fellow^ and the college. The 
modern college, with its foundation, its endowed and 
permanent masterships and fellowships, all the fortu- 
nate holders of these franchises housed and living to- 
gether with their precious stores of tradition, association, 
honors, books, manuscripts, and appliances of learning, 
is the legitimate child of the convent, and has been 
often actually and literally its heir. Here, too, educa- 
tion was at first held to the Church, but within recent 
centuries it has been emancipated to the learned profes- 
sions, — comparatively limited bounds. Knowledge, 
however, was still in coUegio, and not free. This is the 
period of modern Europe and the second stage. 

III. Third comes a stage which has not yet taken 
definite shape or outline, — the stage to which we are 
tending, and for which the American college in its 
present condition is the preparation and vestibule. The 
^vork of this stage I take to be the emancipation of 
learning and education from any class bounds, and its 
free distribution among all the people, — perhaps even at 
their homes, — the fixed centre being a limitation and a 
thing of the past. The system of university examina- 
tions which now covers all England like a network, and 
which Harvard has introduced in the United States, is 
a pronounced movement in this direction. This is the 
period of the near-impending i'uture. 

Vie are now in transition from the second to the 
third stage, and must endure all the unpleasant features 
of transitional existence. 



48 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

But while we may not reproduce the English college 
on our soil, we cannot, therefore, affect to ignore or 
despise it. We are its heir, entitled to all its wealth 
of life, just as the college inherited the treasure and his- 
toric existence of the convent. And it should be our 
study to get this in all its fulness, and as vsoon as pos- 
sible. There are many features of English university 
life which might at once be advantageously adopted or 
adapted here, and I think a most useful training for an 
American college president or professor would be a 
personal study of English university life, — its organi- 
zation, academic discipline, relations to society, and 
daily school and individual life. There could be no 
better qualification for an academic leader. 

Oxford, as a village, is a far lovelier and more pic- 
turesque place than Cambridge. Indeed, as a picture 
to a stranger it is one of the loveliest spots in all 
England, and I much wonder that it is not more of a 
place of summer resort for travellers, especially as dur- 
ing the long vacation chambers are to be had cheap. 
Living, indeed, is always cheap as compared with the 
cost of our life. I noticed in Oxford a placard offering 
fourteen small houses for rent at a gross rental of one hun- 
dred and fourteen pounds. They were houses for work- 
ing-people, four rooms and back-closet and shed, built of 
solid stone, well finished, in a healthful and clean lo- 
cality. This is about forty dollars a year of our money. 

Apart from its academic life and glory, Oxford pre- 
sents many features of attraction to the visitor. Its 
authentic record dates from a.d. 900, and one reads 
the liistory of England down from that time in its ven- 
erable walls and crumbling ruins. 

It has religious associations and memories of surpass- 
ing interest to Protestant faith. In its streets 'once 
flamed the most famous fires of martyrdom in Eng- 
land ; in its halls and chambers preached, in its towers 



OXFORD. 49 

were imprisoned, and from them led to death, tlie death- 
less martyrs. An imposing memorial cross, after the 
general fashion of the handsome Queen Eleanor design, 
erected in the middle of a' handsome street, marks the 
neighborhood of the spot where Archbishop Cranmer 
and Bishops Ridley and Latimer were burned to death.* 

" Then God was witli them, and the glare 
Of their death-fires still lights the land to truth." 

This splendid monument was erected in 1841, and I 
take it was intended as a mute and imperishable memo- 
rial against the Tractarian movement, then in alarming 
progress. From a stern and gray church-tower still stand- 
ing near this spot you see the window from which that ex- 
cellent authority, Burnet, says Cranmer in prison looked 
out and saw his comrades, Ridley and Latimer, burned 
at the stake. He was near enough to see their faces. 

There are several of these martyrs' towers in Oxford 
in which distinguislied scholars and prelates and states- 
men were confined for conscience' sake, and it is depress- 
ing to think that most of them were church -towers, — 
parts of houses dedicated to worship and to the preach- 
ing of a gospel of love, and that men did and could 
worship in them at the very time they Avere desecrated 
to such unholy and unchristian uses. In those dark 
days of Oxford church towers seem to have been built 
with perhaps an ulterior '^ eye to the glory of God," 
but practically and immediately for the purpose of con- 
fining in them such persons as differed in views and 
opinions from the builders or custodians. 

Among the records of Oxford are two sickening bills 
of the executioner in these martyrdoms, charging by 
items for the services of his assistants and for materials, 
fagots, etc., — significant now as monuments of the con- 



* The original picture, by the way, of the " Burning of Eidley 
and Latimer at Oxford," hy Sir George Haytes, left England 
some time ago for Philadelphia, having been purchased by Mr. 
Latimer, a direct descendant. 
c d 5 



50 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

dition of civilization and religion in the sixteenth cen- 
tury. The entire cost of the burning of the two bishops 
was £1 5s. 2d, ; of Cranmer, 12s. 

Oxford has always been noted as against Cambridge 
for its religious activity and coloring of thought. It 
has been in all its history the home of polemics and 
controversy and doctrine. From the ])ulpit and the 
stake, and in later and more gentle years the " com- 
mons room'^ of its precincts, nearly all the great re- 
ligious movements of modern English times have taken 
their start. To-day I believe it furnishes a much larger 
proportion of its graduates to the orders of the Church 
than does its sister Cambridge. 

In the list of its graduates you can almost read the 
religious and ecclesiastical history of England. 

Among them are John Wiclif the Reformer, Tyndal, 
(translator of the Bible and martyr), Archbishop Laud, 
John Foxe ('^ Book of Martyrs"), Cardinal Pole and 
Cardinal Wolsey, Archdeacon Philpot, martyr. Bishop 
Hooper, martyr, Cardinal Moreton, Bishop Jewell, 
Bishop Bonner, " the bloody,'^ Sir Matthew Hale, Cam- 
pian, the noted Jesuit, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Cecil, 
Bishop Heber, Dean Mi I man, both the Wesleys, John 
and Charles, Hooker, the writer, Bishop Butler ("Anal- 
ogy"), Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Browne 
("Religio Medici"), Bishop Lowth, Dr. South, John 
Keble, Rev. F. W. Robertson, Dr. Edward Young, 
Archbishop Whately, Cardinals Manning and John 
Henry Newman, and Dr. Pusey. Cranmcr, Ridley, 
and Latimer were Cambridge men, but they were all 
burnt here. 

I might lengthen out this list almost indefinitely by 
going into the names of distinguished living clergy and 
dignitaries in the English Church, would it not seem 
invidious to make selection. I have mentioned none 
of the men now alive save only the two able princes of 
the Roman empire who claim to rule in England. But 
a glance at this list shows that the great Methodist and 



OXFORD. 51 

Tractarlan movements, so unlike in character and tend- 
ency, were cradled here ; tliat the rehabilitation of the 
Roman Church on English soil in the nineteenth cen- 
tury found its leaders here ; that many of the minor 
currents of modern theological and religious thought 
started here; and that here surged in merciless force the 
fluctuating waves of the English Reformation, out of 
whose conflict, through fire and sword, arose the present 
Churches of England. 

Sydney Smith and Dean Swift, who illustrate how 
oddly the English semi-social, semi-political system of 
filling pulpits sometimes works, were also Oxford men. 

Oxford has been in all its history distinctively the 
Church school, and to-day stands nearer the cloister 
than Cambridge, which, in many features, is tentatively 
stretching forward to the new era. 

Oxford, like Cambridge, has a university press, 
known the world over for the finish and scholarly 
thoroughness of its work. The distinctive feature of 
the Oxford press has come to be the printing of the 
Eno;lish Bible. Here vou o-et the authorized Kincr 
James version in absolute purity of text, every letter 
and point established with critical accuracy and judg- 
ment, and the whole book produced in the highest 
finish of paper, composition, })ress-work, and binding. 
It is the best memento to bring home from Oxford, and 
you can get it in editions of every kind and style and 
price. It claims to be the best-printed Bible in the 
world, and, I suppose, is, and certainly it is invested 
witli more interesting traditions and associations than 
any edition that issues from any other press, for it 
comes from the school-house of Wiclif and Tyndal, 
and the martyr-fires of Cranmer and Ridley in Oxford's 
streets made the circulation of our Entrlish version 
possible. 

It is a curious fact that the traces of an extinct re- 



52 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

ligion survive longest in the forms of the new religion 
which takes the place of the dead one. Long after the 
life of the old faith has fled it still is preserved in the 
ceremonies of the new. In Italy to-day nearly every 
striking fete and feature of the Roman Catholic 
Church is traceable- to customs and rites of the old 
classic faiths which held sway there before the Christian 
era. So in Oxford, a historic religious centre of Eng- 
land, and, as the centres of learning always are, a most 
conservative spot, the vestiges of the forgotten beliefs 
and usages of early paganism in Britain are clearly 
visible in a number of traditional ceremonies which 
have been handed doAvn from the centuries, and whose 
observance is yet jealously maintained, although their 
meaning and original life are long lost. 

The beautiful Magdalen Tower is the pride of Ox- 
ford, and well it may be, for in grace and symmetry 
of architectural design, and the lovely picture of culti- 
vated glebe and wood and water which surrounds it, it 
is one of the finest sights of England. 

On the castellated summit of this tower, every first 
day of May, " at five o'clock in the morning,'^ the choir 
of St. Mary Magdalen College, in vestments, assemble 
and chant a Latin anthem, and in reverential orison 
hail the rising of the sun. Hundreds of people gather 
on the streets and in the parks at the foot of the tower 
to witness this ceremony. This matin rite means noth- 
ing any more now, but is admitted to be the survival 
of some pagan solemnity, — as most May-day customs 
are, — probably of sun worship. 

In Queen's College, to this hour, the ^^ ryghte merrie 
jouste of ye boare's heade" is yet observed with cere- 
monial state on every Christmas day. At dinner in 
the great arched college hall on that day a fine old 
boar's head, bedecked with bays, is solemnly borne 
around the oaken floor, while the college chant the 
sonorous old carol whose words and music are so 
familiar to academic memory : 



OXFORD. 53 

*' Caput Apri differo 

Keddens laudes Domino. 
The boar's head in hand bring T, 
With garlands gay and rosemary ; 
I pray you all sing merrily : 

Qui estis in convivio." 

This observance is most probably a transmitted 
vestige of the Feast of Freyr, the Scandinavian god 
of peace and plenty, held at Yule-tide, when a boar was 
always sacrificed in his honor and as an offering of 
thanks and gratitude. The words of this semi-pagan 
canticle date from the sixteenth century, and, although 
the whole thing is a Norse relic, it was certainly a more 
Christian diversion than burning bishops. 

Non-academic Oxford is a typical English village of 
the prettiest kind, — a village of green hedges framing 
picturesque bits of wood and valley and charming 
homes; of slumbering churchyards toned with gray 
tombstones and dark yews ; of quaint gables and ram- 
bling streets stocked with old-fashioned country inns, 
each one the fitting background of an ever-clianging 
picture of rural sights. All the traditional inn names 
of England seem to be gathered here, and they make 
one of the features of the town. There are the King's 
Head, and the Red Lion, and the Saracen, the Three 
Jolly Farmers and the Three Cups, the ]\Iaiden- 
head, and the Crown, and the Roebuck, and others I 
cannot recall. 

I put up at the Mitre, — the traditional old county 
and university inn, — an interesting historical picture in 
itself of past social life and customs in England. The 
Mitre is to-day but a survival of a past generation, 
of a glory of Oxford that is gone ; but it is still 
an instructive and pleasing remain to an American 
stranger. It is an old-fashioned county inn of the 
once aristocratic kind, of a High-Church and horse- 
racing flavor, redolent of old port and strong red ale, 
patronized by young country squires, who lunch on cold 

5* 



54 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

ham and champagne, and by broad-shouldered, florid- 
faced, cheery Englishmen born of the soil, and '^ who 
they tliemselves have said it." Its very name is a de- 
fiant shout for prelacy and Establishment, an echo of a 
war-cry which carries you back to the old days of 
trouble and party-passion, — the days of Church and 
Crown. 

You enter through an unpretending wooden door, 
heavily barred and crossfastened, into a low broad hall, 
and the first sight which greets your eyes are stout 
rounds of beef and generous flitches of bacon and game 
of various kinds hung by hooks to. the unplaned rafters 
overhead ; you step hastily from under to avoid the 
drops of fat which threaten the unwary lounger (the 
experienced habitues, I soon found out, knew just 
where to stand), and in doing so confront the useful 
young woman who answers as bar-maid, room-clerk, and 
cashier in a British inn, who welcomes you personally 
and pleasantly to the house. Some four-in-hand coach- 
ing-whips of approved pattern and trial ornament the 
hall-way, professionally and gracefully coiled on the 
walls. The guards' loud livery hangs on the pegs vi'ith. 
some gentlemen's overcoats. Several handsome and 
affectionate hounds mingle intelligently with the other 
functionaries, guests, and dignitaries, and you know you 
are at a respectable centre of coaching, hunting, racing, 
and English country sports generally. 

But the bishop's mitre is the trade-mark of the 
house and the historic crest of the 2)lace. This prelatical 
symbol confronts you everywhere and all the time. It 
is panelled in the halls, painted on the walls, carved on 
the doors, burnt in the china, engraved on the glass, the 
silver, and the pewter, and woven in the linen. It 
blushes through your wine, lies placidly under the water 
in your wash-basin, consecrates the stables and dog-ken- 
nels, and seems to rest in contented benediction on your 
ale-tankard. Even the napkins are loyally folded in 
this respectable episcopal device. 



OXFORD. 55 

But it is the benediction of tlie past which comes 
down on the American traveller when he enters tliese 
old-fashioned doors. The Mitre claims to have stood 
here from a.d. 1400, dispensing food and shelter for man 
and beast. Fifteen generations of fathers and sons have 
purchased its hospitalities. In its low-ceilinged coffee- 
rooms men sat, near five hundred years ago, much as 
Ave sit now, and when they talked politics or told the 
news they spoke of Agincourt and glorious King Harry, 
of the execution for treason of the Lollards, of John 
Huss burnt, of the strange maid Joan, the sorceress of 
Arc, luring English soldiers to defeat and shameful 
death on the fields of France, or of how the rude but 
resolute Parliaments of En2:land were wrestlino; with 
the crafty and learned legates of the pope. This is the 
Mitre tavern which the American crosses the seas to 
see, and which, I think, his English cousin on the 
spot never sees. 

The Mitre tavern of Oxford, however, as it exists in 
the flesh to-day, is a thing of the past, and I cannot 
conscientiously recomtnend it to the modern traveller. 
The times have chano;ed and it has not chano;ed with 
them, except, perhaps, to keep abreast with the modern 
extravagant prices. Flavor and picturesque traditions 
are very good in their way, but they will neither feed, 
lodge, nor care for one's comfort and cleanliness. There 
are other and better hostelries now in Oxford, — those 
of our own century. 

The link which connects the Mitre with the present 
time, and drags it, half-alive, into this nineteenth cen- 
tury, is stage-coaching. I entered Oxford on the top 
of a stage-coach and left it in the same glory, and 
warmly advise every traveller for pleasure or study to 
do the same. One sees the country, the estates, and the 
common peo])le for miles as he can by no other way, 
and, by a half-mental, half-physical process, arrives 
at the consciousness of the Englishman's conception 



56 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

of the height of human hap}")iness. The Mitre, by- 
virtue of its lineage and traditions, is the hostel where 
" the coach" puts up, and hence its raison d'etre and 
existence now. 

Four-in-hand stage-coaching in England is something 
more than a rich man's amusement. It is an institution. 
It is the assertion of a national and class tradition, and 
when an English gentleman assumes charge for a sea- 
son of a coach line it is looked on as a patriotic act, 
and the man himself in doing so is deemed to have de- 
served well of his country. 

The stage line from Oxford via London to Cambridge 
is owned and driven by a gentleman of the county, 
Captain B., — his commission in the local militia, I be- 
lieve, — who pleasantly gave the full details of his work 
as we drove along. His line of road is one hundred 
and twenty miles, and his. coach stable is stocked with 
just one hundred and twenty horses, — a horse to the 
mile. He drives this entire route in one day, return- 
ing the next, and resting only on Sunda-y. The schedule 
time either way is twelve hours, starting from the 
Mitre, Oxford, on Monday at nine o'clock A.M., and 
pulling up at The Bull, Cambridge, at nine o'clock p.m., 
reversing the trip on Tuesday, and so on through the 
week. This schedule allows thirty minutes in London 
for luncheon. 

Captain B., a gentleman of about thirty -six, of 
wealth and j)osition, does this work regularly every day 
for a season of some five months each year. I spent a 
week at Oxford, and also at Cambridge, and was person- 
ally witness to the unfailing punctuality of departure and 
arrival at both places. There is no railway in our country 
or in England which does better, — perhaps none which 
does so well. He and his coach were immensely popular 
all along the line. The little villages were always in a 
tumult as we rolled through them. All day every wagon 
or carriage of high or low degree drew off and gave the 
road to ^' the coach ;" the ladies were gathered at many 



OXFORD. 57 

a tempting- looking hall or park gate to see the spirited 
horses, well in hand, dash by foaming and glossy. The 
landed gentry of the neighborhood frequently timed their 
walks so as to come in with us at the changing-places and 
exchange a word of greeting or welcome. Every one, 
high and low, gentle and simple, the entire route 
through, knew all the teams and their respective 
merits, and every inn and station was full of tales and 
legends of them and their driver. From one end of 
the drive to the other the coach was a county institution 
and the captain was a county hero, and to understand 
the meaning of this you must remember that " the 
county^^ is the corner-stone and foundation of English 
life. 

Captain B. had perfected with a master-hand every 
arrangement of detail in his enterprise, and both the 
safety and pleasure of the passengers were looked after 
with scrupulous regard. He carried with him three 
servants, a guard, a valet, and a relay driver in case of 
emergency. While everything was thus provided to 
support and sustain him and keep him in good condi- 
tion, he personally did the work of driving, and it was 
one whose magnitude and steadiness would, I think, 
appal most American gentlemen. It was not a party 
or an excursion, recollect, or a spurt, but regular daily 
work, in wet weather or fine, — this year nearly every 
day wet, — and carried on often without even the relief 
of a congenial companion. 

At the end of the season, the captain told me, he sells 
all his horses by auction at Tattersall's, and sometimes 
makes on them. Having been driven for a season in 
the coach is a good character for a horse and commends 
him in the market. It is a guarantee of careful and 
experienced training. Part of the work and pleasure 
of coaching during the season is the breaking in of the 
new horses. 

There is no one day of English travel which is better 
worth taking than this enjoyable four-in-hand drive 



58 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

from Oxford to Cambridge, or vice versa if you are at 
Cambridge first. You see five counties of England, 
much of its best farm land and southern scenery. You 
enter London and leave it on a seat from which you 
have a view such as you can get in no other mode of 
conveyance. You see the city shading into the country 
for miles and miles on either side, and gain an idea of 
its vast size and of the dense population of rural Eng- 
land such as no reading, statistics, or thinking will give 
you. In London you rest half an hour and lunch at 
the White Horse Cellar, just as English gentry were 
supposed to have done a hundred years ago. It is a 
veritable cellar, down steps, and with a humble and 
unmarked front, but right in the centre of fashionable 
Piccadilly, and preserved in all its original features with 
pious care. 

And best of all you see the English stage-coach in its 
glory, — the struggling survival of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. This is a historic study, and alone is a picture 
worth coming to England for. It is a siglit to see the 
coach roll ofP: it is a greater sight to see it come in at 
the end of the day amid the popular acclaim and en- 
thusiasm that might attend a victorious general return- 
ing from conquest and battles. 

Fully an hour before the time of starting the boys 
and idle men of the town begin to gather around the 
main court-yard and gaze in silent and satisfied contem- 
plation on the great lumbering red-and-yellow vehicle 
which stands empty and unhorsed before the door. 
Then, in due time, the stately guard makes his appear-- 
ance with a burden of responsibility upon his serious 
features. One or more young porters attend his decorous 
footsteps. A hush falls upon the vulgar crowd, and 
then, in measured and authoritative tone, begins the 
issuance of official orders. Ah ! it is a sight to see the 
grandeur of this functionary, conscious that the eyes of 
all the county are upon him, in gorgeous livery and 
high beaver hut and huge bouquet in button-hole, 



OXFORD. 59 

pinned there by the buxom barmaid ; the ministerial 
air with which he determines the proper location of the 
luggage ; the judicial gravity with which he decrees for 
or against a trun k ; tlie grave halt over the proper 
strapping of a box ; the utter repression of any levity 
on the part of his youthful subordinates; the more tiian 
Olympian front with which he accepts the grateful in- 
cense of the common herd ; and the swelling sense of im- 
portance of every favored servant who is intrusted with a 
duty about the wheeled throne, their official communica- 
tions with each other; the distended dignity of every 
groom and footman ; the nervous, expectant look of some 
town youth halfway up in society, who lingers by the 
team and boldly essays to stroke the near wheeler, anx- 
ious to receive a nod, perhaps, happy moment ! a con- 
descending word of recognition, — to be seen talking with 
the swell demigod of a driver when he in due time appears. 

Punctually at 8.59 the lord of the coach, with his 
buttonhole flower, too, and irreproachably dressed, 
walks out of the open door through an aisle of living 
flesh, which opens deferentially before him, ascends the 
box, accepts the reins, and sits for a moment like a 
statue. The guard and the proprietary driver compare 
gold watches, — an awful instant of suspense, — a last 
moment of rapid comprehensive inspection ; the guard 
reports all ready, the horn rings out, and the state 
carriage of the county rolls off* as smoothly and noise- 
lessly as a perfect locomotive, in the hands of a perfect 
engineer, draws its train out of a w^ell-appointed depot. 

As a matter of pride and point of finished etiquette, 
the guard, who has been clambering all over the stage, 
on and off" a dozen times, makes his final report from 
the ground, and then leaps lightly on the wagon after 
the wheels are in motion. His easy professional ascent 
of the coach diagonally is the last touch to the })icture. 

The arrival of the coach is a still more inspiriting 
scene. In an English village all work has stopped at 
four o'clock in the afternoon, perhaps three, and by 



QQ ENGLISH TOWNS. 

< nine p.m. the whole town, men, women, and children, 
are thrown painfully on their own resources for amnse- 
ment or occui)atiou. They are, therefore, more than 
ready for the discharge of any public duty. I have 
repeatedly seeu the streets, both at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, densely packed for squares awaiting the coming 
of the coach, whose horn was to be heard out of the 
darkness at 8.57, growing clearer and livelier as it 
grew nearer. And this not on any extraordinary occa- 
sions, not to meet any prominent guest, but only to 
welcome '^the stage-coach." We simply cannot under- 
stand the feeling with which the Briton clings to an old 
institution, and honors and worships the man who sus- 
tains and asserts it. 

A shout goes up as the heads of the impatient leaders, 
who snuff excitement in the air, touch the crowd. The 
human walls form themselves again, the coach rolls into 
the stand, and, wdth the solemn air of a great duty done, 
the driver drops the reins into the hands of the local 
grooms, who contest for the honor of receiving them. 
Then the cheery welcomes, the questions as to the 
events of the past two days in which the worlds of the 
village and of the coach have been sundered, the orders 
for dinner, and the form and ceremony of the landing. 
The formal service of the morning is all repeated in 
inverse order, and, last of all, the tired and triumphant 
horses disappear into the night, led away like heroes, 
amid thronging masses of attendant Britons. 

I have seen a cabal of veteran politicians decide on 
the policy of a momentous national campaign. I have 
seen battles forced in a flash, and anxious generals 
strike out a plan of action in the saddle and almost 
in the moment of execution. I have seen a council of 
officers, with defeat around them and their dead among 
them, ansAver with solemn defiance a summons to sur- 
render. I have seen half a dozen army corps deploy 
their massed battalions in silence on to a field of history 
and death, — but I have never seen anything half so 



CAMBRIDGE. 61 

impressive, so utterly and overwhelmingly imposing, 
as the arrival or departure of a swell English coach- 
and-four in front of an old-fashioned English country 
inn. 

Oxford, England. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CAMBRIDGE. 



In College Chambers in the University — The Puritan 
College that gave Birth to Harvard — The College- 
Day AT Cambridge — The Suppressed Undergraduate — 
Dinner in the College Hall — A Survival of Baronial 
Times — English College Expenses — A Commonwealth 
OF Letters. 

Some months since, in Rome, I s])ent an afternoon 
in the convent grounds of San Gregoriano, from whose 
pleasant shades St. Augustine carried, hundreds of 
years ago, the seeds of learning and Christianity to 
savage England, leaving the refinement, the culture, 
the religious fellowship of civilization to bear the faith 
to our rude Saxon forefathers. 

To-day I write from the Puritan cloisters of Em- 
manuel College, Cambridge, the historic walls from 
whence the germs of civil freedom, and that education 
which alone can protect and perpetuate it, were borne 
to our New England. It was from this Emmanuel 
College — that Puritan foundation established in faith 
away back in the stormy days of the Commonwealth — 
that w^ent forth the early divines and educated laymen 
who, in our colonial times, laid the firm foundations 
of the civil and religious liberty we enjoy in this land, 
in this generation. And to-day it is grateful and 



Q2 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

pleasing to know that, foremost among the traditions 
of Emmanuel, and cherished among her wealth of 
pious, civic, and scholarly associations, are the memories 
of these graduates, the Harvards and Hookers and 
Wards and Bradshaws of 1600-1650, and the great 
work they did, in which the mother-college claims her 
deserved share. "Among those chiefest worthy of 
honor," says Bacon, " are the founders of states ;" and 
Emmanuel hopes to have securely founded in the New 
World the Commonwealth which went to pieces so 
disastrously in the Old. It is her crown. That staunch 
and learned old Puritan statesman. Sir Walter Mild- 
may, whose liberality and faith laid the foundations of 
Emmanuel in the darkness of uncertainty and political 
trouble, builded better than he knew. 

The language of the charter or deed of foundation 
of the college given by this scholar, soldier, and states- 
man, which I regret I have not at hand to quote at 
this moment of writing, is often touching, and read 
now, in the light of history, is in places dramatically 
]n'ophetic. He held high office under the government of 
Queen Elizabeth, and the fact of his freedom to found, 
in express words, an establishment for the teaching and 
culture of Puritan principles is strong evidence of the 
civil liberties of England in that brilliant epoch of her 
history, and of the intellectual breadth and liberality 
of her political leaders. As the dire(;t ancestor of Har- 
vard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Emmanuel 
College has always had a special interest and attraction 
for the American scholar, and some of our best JSFew 
England and New York families have sent their sons 
to it for their collegiate education. 

From Cambridge of England, however, the interest 
of Emmanuel College takes a wider sweep and range. 
As the academic fountain of Puritanism she Looks on 
our whole land^ people, and history — in one sense, the 
religious and political development of Puritanism — as 
her child and descendant. 



CAMBRIDGE. 63 

A good friend in London, who recognized the Puri- 
tan in me, and who was himself a fellow of Emmanuel 
in residence, was kind enough to invite me to spend a 
week in Cambridge in college quarters, ])lacing at my 
disposal a suite of undergraduate chambers then vacant, 
it being the long vacation. 

The college life of Oxford and Cambridge, the mu- 
nificent development of ages of faith and learning, is 
something so infinitely deeper, broader, richer, and 
better than anything we have in our land, and withal 
so diflPerent, that it is difficult to know how to describe 
it or where to begin the attempt. I do not know, how- 
ever, that I can commence in any better way than by 
attempting a picture of my quarters and working out 
from thence. . 

Cambridge University, as I suppose every one knows, 
is a collection of independent colleges, each with its 
own separate government, buildings, grounds, history, 
and associations. These colleges to-day are seventeen 
in number, and they make up both the university and 
the town. If you will take seventeen silver dollars 
and half-dollars, and throw them down on- a piece of 
white paper irregularly but rather close together, 
draw circles with a pencil around ea<?li of the coins, and 
then connect these circular inclosures by convenient 
lines indicating streets and w^alks, you will have a 
pretty good idea of the plan of Cambridge town. It 
is simply a village which has grown up and around the 
grounds — or what, in Pennsylvania, is called the 
"campus" — of the several colleges. 

What first strikes an American stranger with some 
surprise is the comparatively limited extent of these 
grounds, — the territorial plant of the college. In our 
imaginations these colleges — venerable in age and tra- 
dition, and dowered with the associations of centuries 
— rise in magnificent proportions, and seem to stand in 
princely domains in glebe and forest. As a matter of 
fact, the average college at Cambridge or Oxford has 



g4 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

not a greater acreage in its grounds than the average 
American college ; in fact, has not so great. Harvard, 
I am sure, has larger grounds than most of the English 
colleges. So have Princeton and Union, and, I believe, 
Yale. Pennsylvania is already very generously en- 
dowed in this respect. Few of the English colleges 
have grounds equal in extent or in artistic possibilities 
to those of Jefterson and Washington at Canonsburg, or 
Franklin and Marshall at Lancaster, or the Lehigh at 
Bethlehem, or Dickinson at Carlisle, or Lafayette at 
Easton, or the institution at Mercersburg, or even of 
our University of Pennsylvania, planted on costly acres 
in the built-up streets of a great city. All these have 
greater advantages in the way of scenery and room and 
possible embellishment and artistic enrichinent of their 
grounds than the average English college of the two 
great universities. Some of the college-buildings here 
consist of but a single structure, with such grounds 
only as are inclosed in the interior court. 

On these limited academic fields, however, the con- 
secrated wealth of long centuries has been lavished, 
under the 'guidance and direction of the highest art and 
cultivation of the time. The grounds of some of the 
larger colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are often laid 
out with park and landscape effects such as have hardly 
been reached anywhere in our country. Even the 
smaller ones are carefullv dressed and worked, so that 
an acre or two will often set forth a wonderful study 
of foliage or hue. And all are crowded with grand 
old tombs, mouldy, half-decipherable legends, armorial 
bearings, monuments of history, the graves of martyrs, 
statues, arches, solemn ruins, memorial gateways, 
monumental crosses, picturesque cloisters, and a thou- 
sand works of art and ennobling associations. In the 
successive architecture of many of these noble edifices 
and in the chain of names and graves and monuments 
you can read the history of England from the twelfth 
century down. 



CAMBRIDGE. 65 

It is tliis splendid endowment of tradition, tliis con- 
tinuous legended memorial of the scholarship and piety 
of ages, which is the wealth of the English college. It 
is the contrast with this wliich makes our own college 
life, so far, seem so poor and thin and meagre. 

Another disillusion is the fact that the number of 
under2:raduates in these Eno-lish colleo;es does not differ 
materially from the number in ours. This runs from 
sixty or'seventy up through the hundreds, in some one 
or two cases touching a thousand, just as in our de- 
tached American colleges. It is the massing of these 
English colleges in one column and bringing them all 
under the influences of one another which gives them 
their intellectual force in the world of thought. The 
seventeen colleges of Cambridge are not educating any 
more young men than seventeen isolated American 
colleges, but they are as an organized regular army is 
to a body of loose militia regiments. 

Emmanuel College holds about a medium rank as 
to the extent and decoration of its grounds. The 
extensive front of the great college-building is Greek, 
with some adaptation of English style, — this in the 
way of protest against the ecclesiastical architecture of 
most of the other colleges. The central feature of the 
main edifice to an American eye is the high quadrangle 
or interior court, faced on two sides with arcades, and 
bright with its shaven lawn of grass ever green and 
smooth and fresh. The entrances to the chambers of 
the fellows and undergraduates open on to this court, 
always known over Cambridge in college vernacular as 
the" quad. '^ Although . this residence portion of the 
college is but one building, it is divided into sections 
or grand compartments, very much like the separate 
houses of a city row, having no communication with 
one another, and each section entered only from its own 
front door. These sections, or houses, consist of about 
six or eight sets of chambers, two or three of which are 
e 6* 



gg ENGLISH TOWNS. 

occupied by fellows, the remainder by undergraduates. 
In older times this was the family, the fellows being 
charged with some care of the students. This is not 
the case now, although the fellows always take a kindly 
interest in their undergraduate neighbors, feel, perhaps, 
some little historic responsibility, invite the boys, at all 
events once or twice, to breakfast with them, and if 
there is any community of tastes or feelings it results 
in a valuable association and acquaintance -for the 
undergraduate. He is in the care of an older man, 
who feels for him as a brother. 

Now for the life of the undergraduate, the only col- 
lege-life known in our country. My quarters, as I 
have said, were the ordinary suite of chambers of an 
undergraduate student, absent at the time, and their 
description will appear rather sumptuous to the Ameri- 
can graduate who recalls the two-in-a-small-room ac- 
commodation of many a good Pennsylvania college. 
This suite consisted of three good-sized chambers, with 
a small pantry or closet-room. The main chamber, by 
which you enter your suite, is a tine large room about 
twenty feet square, looking out with three windows on 
the quadrangle. 

In this sitting- and reception-room are served your 
breakfast and luncheon by your own servant, and at- 
tached to it is the pantry, a capacious closet for the 
storage of your table-linen and service, and large 
enough for your attendant to make a little coffee or tea, 
wash the dishes, or cook a slight breakfast. Out of 
this large room open two smaller one^, ten by fourteen 
feet, a bed-chamber, and a study or private retiring- 
room. 

Each section, or house of six or eight suites, has its 
own separate servants, with their own quarters, to whose 
services each fellow or student has equal rights. This 
staff consists generally of a man and wife or small 
family, who can, between them, readily cook the break- 
fasts, prepare the morning baths, brush the clothes, 



CAMBRIDGE. 67 



black boots, and run the errands of tlie six or eight 
single gentlemen who form the family. Some of these 
servants, as is always the case around a college, become 
quite scholastic in appearance and demeanor. In Cam- 
bridge this male attendant is known as the '' gyp ;" in 
Oxford as the '^ scout.^' 

The development of the undergrad nates' quarters to 
the present generous provision illustrates somewliat tlie 
progress of social life and habits during the past 
century or two, and affords evidence of some curious 
changes. In early times undoubtedly two or more 
students were quartered together. ^' Chum" is a con- 
traction of chambermen. It is likely, in remote times, 
that six students occupied a common sleeping-room 
with three or more beds in it ; but even then each one 
of them, as the ancient buildings show, had his sepa- 
rate little cell, generally opening out of the common 
bed-chamber, to which he retired to read, study, or 
^' muse." From this habit this little cell became known 
as the student's ^^ museum." Here w^e have the history 
of another word now diverted to quite a different 
special use. The change in personal habit and feeling 
made by a few hundred years is quite curious. The 
student of Cambridge to-day would willingly read, 
write, or study in a common chamber with another 
man, but he would, under no circumstances, share his 
bed -room with him. 

My rooms look out on either side on prospects 
pleasing to the eye, cultivating to the taste, and ele- 
vating in association and suggestion. On one side they 
command the classic green quadrangle, all shaven and 
shorn, with its cloistered arcades, venerable gray tombs, 
monumental legends, and the admonitory walls and 
columns of gone ages. On the other side the study and 
bed-chamber sweep a small stretch of college park, 
lookino; out on rardens with ivy and roses, and a clear 
little stream in which, from your wuidows, you can see 
the fishes swimming under the crystal waters, and on 



68 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

whose quiet bosom placid ducks and philosophic swans 
live in amity with their finny friends. Wide, roomy 
seats are built into these wdndows, in the pleasant old 
English fashion, and very delightful and restful they 
are when you look out from them on noble trees, 
charming gardens, and vistas of leafy boughs and 
lake and meadow. Compare this with the red brick 
walls and the bare wastes of clay, and, perhaps, the 
barren, neglected campus, which form the entourage of 
a new American school and leave their painful photo- 
graph forever on the minds of its children. 

On the walls of these rooms hang some good en- 
gravings and a small painting, a mounted fox head and 
brush, a worn horseshoe, probably from the heels of 
some triumphant racer, whips, spurs, crossed oars, some 
hunting pictures. It is proper to add that there are 
also some books. The suites of the fellows are gene- 
rally somewhat superior in accommodation to those of 
the undergraduates. 

Life in one of the colleges of an English university 
is something very different from that of an American 
college. Intellectually it is something far higher and 
stronger. The undergraduate is not the central feature, 
as with us, but only an incident. The living college is 
the master and the fellows. The undergraduates are 
but the younger members of the academic family and 
on the threshold of the house, — the little children who 
are seen and not heard. 

Again, not the least part of the liberal endowment 
of an English college is the tradition of social usage 
and habit which it carries down, by force of which any 
student coming to live within its walls and sharing its 
life receives the training of a gentleman, acquiring the 
personal habits and manners which fit him for associa- 
tion with the better classes of society. In the average 
American college the student leaves either a boor or a 
gentleman, just as he entered. In the English college, 
however, the home for hundreds of years of the sons 



CAMBRIDGE. 69 

of gentlemen, the habit of life has become fixed and 
traditional, and any boy going through it comes out 
with that as a part of liis education. 

The daily life of the English college-resident is 
simple, and differs from ours distinctively in the care 
with which it is arranged to distribute the time for 
work and exercise or rest, and the ease with which it 
consequently bears on the individual. The English 
student attains a far higher grade of scholarship than 
ours, but we never hear of his breaking down, of shat- 
tered nerves and prostrated brain. He takes more 
time, it is true, but saves his body and his head. 

The order of the college day is roughly this : Bathe 
in your room at six or seven o'clock ; breakfast served 
in your front chamber at seven or eight o'clock ; read- 
ing until one o'clock p.m., when there comes a light 
lunch in your room, generally only bread and cheese 
and strong college ale. 

Lunch-hour ends absolutely the day of study or 
work. At this point the whole college — master, fel- 
lows, and students — betakes itself to the open air, and 
spends the whole afternoon, until six or seven o'clock, 
out of doors, walking, riding, boating, fishing, or at ath- 
letic games. It is here the college boy builds himself up 
for life. At seven o'clock dinner, and from dinner to 
bedtime rest. This is the common schedule of an or- 
dinary university day. I have heard that there are 
" reading men" who burn the midnight oil far into the 
night, but I write only of what I have seen. 

The college dinner is an imposing and perhaps the 
central feature of the daily life of the university. 
Here, in the great hall, the whole college meets together 
in pleasant union, and it is, I believe, now the only 
general meeting of the day, compulsory prayers being 
abolished except on extraordinary occasions. The hall 
itself — a survival of the old baronial times of the days 
of the "boar's head and rosemary" — is always one 
of the most striking architectural features of the college 



70 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

building. It is a fine and lofty room, with arched or 
fretted or handsomely-designed roof, the walls adorned 
with rich panelling and carvings, statues, heraldic de- 
vices, armorial shields, and old inscriptions, and hung 
with the portraits of founders and benefactors, kings, 
queens, statesmen, and soldiers. It is generally oaken, 
with stone or wooden floors. 

At one end of the great hall, the farthest from the 
entrance, on a raised surface, is placed the table of the 
master and fellows, extending across the room ; on the 
lower level of the floor are tables for the undergrad- 
uates, running the length of the room, and placed at 
right angles with the master's table. All are served at 
the same time and alike. When the hour for dinner 
comes, the master and fellows, with their guests if 
there are any, assemble in the combination-room, another 
fine chamber, of which anon, and move from there into 
tlie dining-room, the master leading. The same order 
of procession and seating of guests holds as at any gen- 
tleman's table. As the procession from the combina- 
tion room enters the main hall, the undergraduates, 
who are already seated, rise from their benches and 
stand as the college passes. When the procession 
reaches the head of the table, one of the students reads 
or intones a brief Latin prayer, and all seat them- 
selves. At the close of the meal the same ceremony 
is repeated, the undergraduates rising and standing at 
attention as the master and fellows pass out. In 
Queen's College, Oxford, I believe the summons to 
dinner is yet blown from a trumpet by a tabarder, 
but this is exceptional. 

This college dinner, taken thus every day in the 
academic ancestral hall, in the presence of the efiigies 
of great men and good women, the founders and an- 
cestors of the house, in the midst of historic associations 
and venerable traditions, is the dress-parade of univer- 
sity life. 

The dinner, I should have said before^ is the ordinary 



CAMBRIDGE. 71 

solid English evening meal of four or five courses, — 
a soup, a fisli, roast meat and vegetables, a salad and 
dessert. Ale is served the under2;;rad nates on allowance, 
I believe. On the master's tables there are generally 
wines, in some colleges on allowance, at others ordered 
at cost prices. The Englishman, however, generally 
always drinks a huge flagon or tankard of ale with his 
wines, sometimes before and sometimes after. It seems 
always to be in place to the British stomach. The col- 
lege cellars, I need hardly add, are most excellent: tra- 
dition does its work kindly and gently even here, and 
one generation takes care of the next. 

Dinner over, the undergraduates are dismissed to their 
rooms, while the master and fellows retire to " the com- 
bination-room," where over their coffee and after-dinner 
wines the evening is spent in conversation and discourse. 
The combination-room is a spacious chamber, large 
enough usually to accommodate forty to sixty men, in 
solid old-fashioned arm-chairs, with tables, rests, screens, 
and stools. It is also hung w^ith memorial paintings 
of benefactors, masters, distinguished " fellows'' who 
have passed out into the Avorld and become statesmen, 
cardinals, generals, writers, martyrs, or won fame in any 
way. Every old college has its gallery of these its 
honored children, and they are among its chiefest treas- 
ures. The room itself quickly becomes a centre of in- 
teresting association and academic tradition. In our 
combination-room at Emmanuel, for instance, more than 
one hundred years ago, Dr. Samuel Johnson was a fre- 
quent visitor, and the spot where he always sat, just to 
the left of the warm chimney-place as you face it, is 
])ointed out as a tradition to-day, and the broad chairs 
we sat in this year were the same used then. It was in 
the combination-room of Oriel College, when Keble, 
and Whateley, and Newman, and Arnold, and Pusey 
were fellows, that the celebrated " Tractarian'^ move- 
ment took its start. 

The fellows of a college in residence at times may be 



72 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

only eight or ten, when, of course, this room is too 
large, but the little groups gather in the gloaming of 
the fireplace, and the effect of tlie shadows around them 
advancing or retreating into the dark recesses of the 
spacious walls is very picturesque. Wax candles, I 
may say here, with their antique religious light, are en 
regie in a well-regulated old combination-room, gas 
being too modern and shoddy. A solemnly stately but- 
ler, with white hair and portly, judicial air, is also an 
indispensable property. 

Smoking, I believe, is not customary in the combina- 
tion-room, the fellows, who retire at their convenience 
during the evening, going to their own chambers singly 
or in squads for a pipe or cigar. At eleven or twelve 
the English university man brews a pot of hot tea, 
drinks it, and on this extraordinary sleeping-potion goes 
to bed. Here ends the college day. 

Emmanuel College was founded to nourish and as- 
sert the Puritan principles inside the Church of Eng- 
land, and for a longtime it distinctively represented the 
Puritan idea in English thought and history. Its very 
name was a battle-cry. Emmanuel — " God with us" 
— was the watchword and popular device of the early 
Puritans. They wrote it at the head of their letters, 
used it as a common form of salutation in their homes 
and on the streets, and later on under Cromwell shouted 
it at the head of regiments in the crucial hour of battle. 
The chapel of this Puritan college, as a protest against ec- 
clesiastical tendencies and superstitious usages, was built 
plain as a Methodist meeting-house, pointed north and 
south instead of east and west, and was never consecrated. 

Those stirring old times are gone, and nothing is left 
of them at Cambridge, not even tlie cold ashes of the 
dead controversies. The ancient theological camp is 
now the pleasant home of humaner letters and a pas- 
sionless science which studies their remains as it would 
the nerves of a frog or the traces of a prehistoric hab- 



CAMBRIDGE. 73 

itation of the globe. Toleration, a spirit of judicial 
study, is the claim and intellectual boast of the Cam- 
bridge of to-day. It is its pride now that it never 
burnt a bishop on either side when the fires of hate 
and narrowness were flaming over all England. 

Speaking one evening at King's College table of 
Whistler, — 

'' It may be heresy here," I said, " to admit to an 
enjoyment of his paintings.'' 

" There are no heresies in Cambridge," promptly 
spoke up the senior fellow at the table. 

In looking over the worn and somewhat defective 
records of the early years of Emmanuel College one 
sees very clearly the direct stream of its influence on 
the thought and history of our land. From its walls 
came Thomas Hooker, John Cotton, Nathaniel Ward, 
John Ward, and many of the lesser divines of colo- 
nial New England, John Bradshaw, president of the 
court which tried Cliarles L, and others of the famous 
regicides, some of whom sleep to-day on our shores, 
and also a large number of the historic ^' Assembly of 
Divines," w^ho, in the palmy Parliamentary days of 
Puritanism, drafted the " Shorter Catechism" in West- 
minster Abbey. 

After much search we found, on the original rolls, 
the date of the taking of his degree of M.A. by John 
Harvard, the early scholar who has given his name to 
the new Cambridge University of our country. It ^vas 
in 1628. This date, I think, has never before been 
published, not being found in the large two-volumed 
history of Harvard. The record of graduation seems 
to have been lost, but the degree is taken in course. 

Among the incidental library treasures of Emmanuel 
shown me was an autograph letter from Edward Everett, 
who visited the college some thirty years airo, examined 
with interest its records, and on returning home sent it 
some volumes of New England academic history. 

It seemed at times rather odd to me to recall the 

D 7 



74 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

memories of the rigid old Puritanism of self-sacrifice 
and severe manners and personal austerity — the old 
Puritanism we know so well in our land — here in its 
modern home. The old Greek walls, with their once 
hard Pro^es^ant lines, are toned and softened and 
mellowed by time. The rigid distinctive intellectual 
principles of ancient struggles are lost in the broader 
culture and wider range of modern thought. The 
Puritan college of Cambridge to-day does not differ 
materially from the High Church college or the Broad 
Church college of the same university. The old 
names are there held in affectionate memory, like 
family portraits, but that is all. I hardly think the 
gaunt old Puritan of the seventeenth century would 
recognize his Emmanuel boy at Cambridge to-day. I 
much fear the undergraduate has a carnal knowledge 
of playing cards and running horses and boat-racing 
and strange wines and ungodly games, and I do not 
think the corporate fellows would object to having 
their college and now-consecrated chapel all covered 
over with Madonnas and saints and crucifixes, if only it 
w^ere done in good taste and in the highest glory of mar- 
ble and stained glass, and mosaic and oaken carving. 

But these Puritan descendants have not forgotten 
their fathers. They may not lead their austere lives 
to-day any more than they should wear their quaint 
clothes, nor would it do any more good. But they 
give to all the freedom for wdiich the Puritan fought, 
and thus afford the sweetest incense to his memory, 
and in the daily college life keep green the names of 
the founders and leaders. They venerate the ancestral 
manes ; they honor their parents in the goodly land 
which the Lord has given them ; and every evening the 
gathering in the combination-room is a reverent func- 
tion in piam memoriam. The libation is generally 
claret, sometimes port. 

I w^as interested in finding how moderate are the 



CAMBRIDGE. 75 

expenses of the iinclergrad nates at Cambridge in com- 
parison with the generous provision for his living and 
tuition. An allowance of seven hundred and fifty 
to one thousand dollars a year will sustain a boy 
creditably. This sum will not only cover necessary 
expenditures, but enable him to bear his fair share in 
the college amusements, boating, cricket, etc., and mix 
on equal terms with his associates. My friends thought 
one thousand dollars a rather generous estimate, which 
should also cover the travelling expenses of the year to 
and from Cambridge from a home in England. For 
this sum the student not only gets the thorougli train- 
ing of a strong college, but lives in the strengthening 
atmosphere of seventeen colleges, with all their splendid 
inheritance of centuries of tradition and association. 

In outward organization the university is a union of 
independent colleges forming a literary commonwealth. 
These colleges hold to the central government much the 
relation of our States to the national government at 
Washington. Indeed, following out the line of this 
comparison, the university might aptly be called the 
United Colleges of Cambridge. This phrase will, 
perhaps, best convey to the American mind the outline 
of its constitution. Each college manages its own in- 
ternal affairs, regulates its own admissions, establishes 
its own Gursus, governs its own students, administers 
its own endowment, and elects its own master. The 
university organization masses the forces of the whole 
of them as against the outside world. It confers de- 
grees, elects members to Parliament, and generally 
deals with the outward or "foreign affairs" of the 
academic commonwealth. 

Under recent acts of Parliament very considerable 
changes are being made in the constitution of the uni- 
versities and the administration of the colleges, but 
they are too wide and complex to take up in the limits 
of this paper. The general movement I may say, 



76 ENGLISH TOWNS. 

however, is towards centralization, — ^tbe strengthening 
the University at the expense of the several individual 
colleges. 

In fact, I must stop here, noting only in closing one 
mediaeval touch of local color. Every night here, pre- 
cisely at nine o'clock, the curfew-bell sounds. It tolls 
just the same strokes as in the troubled times of the 
JSTorman conquest, carrying us back hundreds of years, 
but it cannot carry us off to bed any more. 

Cambridge, England. 



ENGLISH POLITICS. 



7* 77 



CHAPTER YIII. 

ENGLISH POLITICAL LIFE. 

A Transition of Sovereign Power in Progress — The Eng- 
lishman's Development from the "Subject" into the 
<* Citizen" — Government of the Great Families — The 
Aristocratic Order — Land its Basis — The Blow to 
English Society that Comes from our Prairies — The 
English Castle and the Kansas Wheat-Field — A 
Bloodless and Silent Kevolution — The Kunnymede 
of 1880. 

English politics are an extremely interesting study 
at this moment, because they are in a transition state, 
and the old forces and the new define themselves more 
clearly than when the country is in repose and standing 
still. The government is passing from the hands of 
an aristocracy into the hands of the people, and this 
by reason of a change in the social structure of Eng- 
land itself. The old England whose corner-stone is 
class and privilege is dissolving in the new political 
acids of the nineteenth century. The stratification of 
society — many classes and orders of the people, and 
these classes resting one upon another — is giving way 
to a new order of things, where, as nearly as possible, 
society becomes homogeneous, rank is done away with, 
and all classes are fused into one mass. 

For many centuries England has been governed by 
its great families. The castle was the eerm of political 
power, as the township is with us. The people were 
not sharers in the management of the nation, but 
"subjects," nominally of the crown, really of that 
order — or, in American parlance, " ring" — of great 

families who made and unmade kings and queens. 

79 



80 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

Now the Englishman is developing from the "sub- 
ject" into the " citizen/' This is the silent revolution, 
social and political, w'hich is in progress to-day in Eng- 
land. It is noiseless, bloodless, after the fortunate 
fashion of the land, and moves ever without violence, 
but it is none the less radical and thorough. 

No one can look on the landed aristocracy of Great 
Britain without a sense of profound admiration for the 
power and self-control which have constructed and 
sustained the order. For many centuries it has 
governed England absolutely, controlling to its own 
use and behoof the power of the crown, the Church, 
the army, the schools, and subordinating to itself and 
its own uses trade and commerce and wealth. There 
has been a breadth and intelligence and self-restraint 
necessary to achieve and keep all this which challenges 
respect and admiration. These great families acquired 
and held all the land of the country, and so held a 
nation as tenants. When votes became the coin of 
government, they kept all the votes to themselves. 
Withal there was a certain conscientiousness in all this 
princely plunder. They did not defend it as a lordly 
robbery. They wished to show a better title than 
the sword for this high estate, and so they held it all 
in trust for the nation. The ballot was a trust in the 
hands of the few to be exercised for the benefit and 
good of the many. This was Burke's famous theory, 
brilliantly elaborated in his brilliant style, and doubt- 
less he believed it. And if you ask an English lord 
of to-day, he will tell you that he holds his magnificent 
estates, — hundreds of broad farms, villages, towns, 
counties, — not as a selfish personal possession, but in 
trust for all the people. Nevertheless, in both of these 
instances it is clearly a case where the trusteeship is 
more desirable than the usufruct. 

The people have gotten the votes to themselves, and 
now they are getting the land. This is the revolution. 

Without question, the large English holder by descent 



ENGLISH POLITICAL LIFE. gl 

does feel a responsibility over, which the American 
landowner by purchase never experiences. His fatiiers 
did acquire their land as a trust, to defend the kingdom. 
The trust has passed now into a different shape, and 
those who are conscientious recognize it. The defect of 
the theory is that those who are not conscientious or intel- 
ligent do not recognize it, and there is no way of making 
them. The suffering usufructuaries have no remedy. 
The submergence of the English aristocracy in the waves 
of the people is a sight which even the American re- 
publican views not without a certain sadness. The 
ultimate gain to the whole people is large. The 
immediate loss to the world is definite and sliarp. As a 
class the aristocracy of England is probably the best 
and highest that has ever been. It has been more con- 
scientious, more dignified, of a higher moral and in- 
tellectual grade, than the nobility of any other country. 
To its blood and birth it has added education and 
wealth, consecrating them to its high social and politi- 
cal uses. Thus it has become educated without pedan- 
try, and wealthy without vulgarity. It is this trinity 
of hereditary power and education and wealth Avhich 
has made it strong and permanent. 

As a consequence of all this it has evolved a very 
higli type of man and woman, — a flower for the enjoy- 
ment of all the world. In physical health, in personal 
cultivation, in gentle manners, in a delicate sense of 
honor, in the perfection of his mode and order of life at 
home, the English gentleman of our day stands without 
a rival. Other classes of other countries may approach 
or equal him in some one of these points, but in the com- 
bination of them all there is none that comes near him. 

Now, the lower-class Englishman, in whom, by the 
force of numbers, he will be lost, is not a pleasing or 
desirable order of man. When the English aristoc- 
racy goes down it is not merely the dissolving of a 
venerable historical picture, like a ruined abbey or a 
fallen castle. It is a positive loss. Thoughtful Eng- 
f 



82 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

lislimen to-day will tell you that the imminent danger 
to English society is the coming up of large masses of 
uneducated wealth, which, presumptuous and vulgar just 
in proportion to its ignorance, deteriorates and lowers 
the tone of opinion and thus degenerates the fibre of the 
whole social structure. This is so in every country, but 
is especially so in England, for the lower-class English- 
man is a peculiarly ungracious and disagreeable kind of 
being. The safety of England and the hope of good 
for all her classes lie in the fact that this change has 
been going on very slowly. 

Just at present, however, there are many indications 
that a crisis is threatening that may hasten the course 
of English history beyond its average slow movement. 
Curiously enough, the impulse comes directly from our 
side of the ocean. 

Land is the basis of the English aristocracy. Its 
rentals have been their revenue, and all of it, for a peer 
could not go into trade. The rental of land depends 
ultimately on its bread-yielding power, — the value of 
the wheat it will raise. But land, having become the 
corner-stone of social position and power of all kinds, 
has come to have a fictitious value in England far be- 
yond its wheat-raising value. The new-made millionaire 
in England is nothing until he owns a large country 
estate. This, and this alone, will give him any position 
in the county and open, grudgingly and sparingly 
enough it is true, the doors of society. Consequently, 
the new manufacturer and tradesman buy it at any price. 
Thus it has come to pass that in recent years, while the 
rents or income of land have been coming down, the 
price of land has been going up. The new men want 
it without reference to its legitimate value. 

With the rise of commercial fortunes values have been 
going up all over England, as over the world. It costs 
more to live, and the landed classes, even if getting the 
rents of a hundred years ago, are relatively poorer. But 



ENGLISH POLITICAL LIFE. g3 

they do not get the old rents, for the value of wheat is 
going down all the time; and the value of wheat is the 
measure of the rent which the tenant-farmer can pay. It 
is the farmer whose profits su{)port the landed aristoc- 
racy. The castle rests on the farm. Now, it is the tre- 
mendous importation, at ever cheaper rates, of our 
American wheat into England which is steadily lower- 
ing the market price of English wheat and the rental 
of English farms. Thus comes a dramatic situation. 
The Kansas farmer, the men of Minnesota, Nebraska, 
and Dakota, all-innocent of their work, are sapping 
away the foundations of the aristocracy of England. 
Every swath in a Western wheat-field tojDples a stone 
from an English castle. 

The social and political fate of the strongest and 
ablest aristocracy of Europe is being worked out to-day 
on a foreign continent and by emigrants from Europe, 
— the stones which the builders rejected there. It is 
Nemesis. 

This is the situation, and ev^ery year it is getting 
worse and worse, for every year the price of land will 
represent less and less its bread-yielding power and 
more and more its social power, and with the perfection 
of transportation and the opening of wider areas to cul- 
tivation American wheat will be laid cheaper and 
cheaper at English doors. Then, again, another pres- 
sure hastens the crash. Growing slowly poorer, the 
landed nobility have been for a generation or two doing 
what most other people do in like situation, — borrowing 
and mortgaging their land. To-day the landed estates 
of England, as a whole, are heavily encumbered, many 
of them up to their full value. As the power to pay 
off debt is steadily decreasing, this effort for relief only 
speeds the final disaster. One of the imminent questions 
which confronts most gravely the new^ Parliament is 
some plan for the relief by law of the landed estates of 
Great Britain burdened by the debts and charges of 
generations. 



84 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

However radical the social and political changes in 
progress in England, there will not likely be any 
change in the form of government in our time: Eng- 
land loves a form too well. The great families admin- 
istered their aristocratic government under the form of 
a monarchy. The people likely will administer a re- 
publican government under the same monarchical form. 
England to-day is as republican as we are in many 
things, but the old forms remain unchanged, — venerable 
and picturesque, but lifeless. 

This is the revolution which is going on to-day in 
the England of our sight, and it is as great and impor- 
tant as any in her history, as sharp in its lines, as far- 
reaching in its consequences. Conventional travellers 
seek out the plains of Runny mede to sentimentalize or 
indulge in patriotic platitudes, but there is a current 
flowing through Westminster to-day, and at every 
election-poll in England, with a stream clearer and 
swifter and more fateful than ever ran the historic 
water-brooks of Surrev. 



CHAPTER IX. 

GLADSTONE. 



The English Statesman in his London Home — A Pen- 

PORTEAIT OE THE MaN — ThE SCHOLAR IN EUROPEAN POLI- 
TICS — Mr. Gladstone on American Government Admin- 
istration — The Payment oe our National Debt — His 
Fundamental Eepublicanism — Eree Trade, 

I FOUND Mr. Gladstone, the scholar-statesman of 
England, among books, letters and MSS., and volumes 
laid in successive strata on his table. The last number 
of the Nineteenth Century served as a paper-weight, 
holding down a mass of official parchments. A file 



GLADSTONE. 85 

of Greek newspapers peeped out from the covert of a 
pigeon-hole, — Cyprus was then the bete noir of English 
politics, — looking like erudite mummies among the 
strapped and indorsed bandies of jiarliamentary briefs 
and " orders for the day/^ The " Homeric studies'^ of 
the Oxford "double-first" scholar were comino; into the 
most })ractical kind of play as a political force. Dis- 
raeli himself could not have asked a more dramatic 
situation. 

Mr. Gladstone's London dwelling is a plain, spacious 
house, one of a substantial " row," with the ordinary 
architectureless front of a close-built city street. It 
stands on Harley Street, in one of the most solid and 
respectable quarters of London. Inside there is only 
the usual provision of the average well-ofp citizen, — a 
great deal of comfort, but no display. He avoids the 
palace-atmosphere in his own home, just as he eschews 
the glamour of imperial ideas in politics. Simplicity 
is, indeed, one of Mr. Gladstone's ruling characteristics. 
The visiting-card of the ex-premier of England reads 
simply " Mr. W. E. Gladstone." 

This is, indeed, all the rank he is entitled to under 
the social laws of England, which are held more binding 
and sacred throughout the land than the acts of Par- 
liament. It is one of the triumphs of the English 
social organization, which it has taken centuries to 
perfect, that at a London dinner-party Mr. Gladstone 
(out of office) would have to yield precedence to any 
hobbledehoy of a school-boy whose father chanced to be 
an earl. 

In this modest house the work-room of the veteran 
statesman is a moderate-sized chamber on the second 
story, lined with books and very solidly furnished 
with heavy table, large, comfortable leathern chairs, 
and a few fine engravings, some of political, some of 
art interest, the day's papers on the floor. A vase of 
fresh flowers, full of color and bloom, smiled through 
the sombre smoke and muddy fog of London. 



3g ENGLISH POLITICS. 

In personal appearance Mr. Gladstone is an active, 
lithe, muscular man, rather tall, and of well-propor- 
tioned frame. His face and figure have that clear-cut 
contour whicli generally indicates several generations 
of intellectual activity and personal leadership. Mr. 
Gladstone is the descendant of a long line of Scottish 
kirdmen of small wealth and limited possessions, but 
accustomed to stand first in their community, to think, 
and to lead. The face is scholarly, cultivated, its out- 
lines boldly defined by that meagreness of muscle which 
distinguishes the intellectual athlete. There is not an 
ounce of superfluous flesh on it. The thin lips and well- 
cut mouth and chin betoken firmness, determination, 
and endurance. Seventy summers have sat lightly on 
Mr. Gladstone, but the years have brought their bless- 
ing of rest, and his face in general wears the repose of 
strength and experience, strongly lined with the record 
of struggle and thought. A new fact, however, or an 
aggressive opinion wakes the whole man with the fire 
of youth, and the eye flashes with eager light, and the 
body bends quickly forward, as if to grasp a fresh ac- 
quisition. 

Like all strong Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone is a man 
of large physical power and endurance, fond of out- 
door air and work, and the ring of his axe at Ha war- 
den, so familiar to England, has echoed even across the 
Atlantic. 

An Eton boy and a Christ Church graduate, I 
found at Oxford that the great university had already 
in living memory enrolled Mr. Gladstone among her 
jewels of state, with Wolsey and Pole and Laud and 
Hampden and Vane and Clarendon and Sir Thomas 
More and Marlborough and Pitt, and the long list of 
her sons who have led in field and council, consecrating 
their trained powers to the service of their country. 
If Mr. Gladstone owes to his university the intellectual 
training and discipline which have enabled him to stand 
foremost among the political leaders of his time, he has 



GLADSTONE. 87 

amply repaid the debt in the conscientious devotion 
with which he has served at the altars of learning dur- 
ing a busy and eventful life, and a long one, for the 
premier's political career began within one year from 
his college graduation, when he was elected to the House 
of Commons as a Conservative. Within two years from 
that time he was in the ministry as an under-secretary. 

Notwithstanding the strain of a continuous political 
career in a country whose political service is, perhaps, 
the most exacting in the world at this time, — its interests 
encircling the globe, — Mr. Gladstone has been a most 
prolific writer, his range of study and discussion run- 
ning pretty much over all the fields of modern thought. 
His greater works, " Homer and the Homeric Age," 
"Juventus Mundi,'' *'Ecce Homo," "Vatican De- 
crees," are, perhaps, as well known to the educated 
classes of our own country as to those of England. 
They do not begin, however, to represent the immense 
bulk and varied range of Mr. Gladstone's literary 
labors. These are best seen in the wonderful wealth 
of his magazine articles, which have flowed in a steady 
stream for a generation now through the periodical 
press of England. An edited collection just made by 
one of the London publishers forms quite a respectable 
library in itself. In fact, Mr. Gladstone's contributions 
to the magazine literature of the day have been more 
voluminous than those of many a professional writer. 

In outlining Mr. Gladstone's literary rank and work 
one cannot help noting the absence of any high schol- 
arship in American politics as contrasted with its 
marked presence in European statesmanship. Edu- 
cation, of course, is a prerequisite for the European 
politician, but, further, a respectable degree of scholar- 
ship may even be said to be demanded. Personal cul- 
tivation, I may add, is a further incidental qualification 
growing out of the social structure of the Old World. 

A glance at the English political leaders of the day 
shows how thoroughly scholarship has entered into 



88 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

their lives. Disraeli, ex-premier^ is a distinguished 
novelist. Of Gladstone, premier of to-day, author, 
essayist, magazinist, I have just spoken, and I might 
have noted his breathing Latin renderings of standard 
hymns which have gone into classic literature. The late 
Earl of Derby, another premier, is known the learned 
world over for his translation of the Iliad. Lord 
Brougham was almost the first scholar of his day. 
The Earl of Caernarvon, a distinguished reviewer, has 
just published a translation of the Agamemnon of 
JEschylus. The Duke of Argyll has published elabo- 
rate works on politico-theological themes. 

Coming down a little farther. Lord Houghton finds 
leisure from his duties in the House of Peers to con- 
tribute a volume of poems, while such active political 
workers as Sir Charles Dilke, Mr. Edward Jenkins, 
Sir George Campbell, Henry Vivian, M.P., Lord 
Lytton, Sir Bartle Erere, Lord DufFerin, Sir Henry 
Rawlinson, and others, have all published popular 
books of more or less literary ability. Sir Garnet 
Wolseley is an accomplished military writer, author of 
an admirable " Soldiers' and Officers' Hand-Book." 
Henry Eawcett, M.P., is professor of political economy 
at Cambridge as well as a distinguished writer. 

Coming to Erance, it is no less striking. Thiers has 
given to the world a jnece de resistance in twenty vol- 
umes. Victor Hugo, Girardin, Lamartine, Laboulaye, 
Montalembert, Jules Simon, Guizot, are names familiar 
and distinguished equally in politics and in literature. 
The Comte de Paris has produced the most elaborate 
and the best history of our civil war yet written, and 
perhaps the best of all the books called out by our 
great struggle. Olivier has a new work just announced, 
and Jules Eavre one just out. Even Louis Napoleon 
felt it desirable to assume a virtue if he had it not, 
and issued an imperial "Life of Csesar." 

In Italy, Menghetti, prime minister of the outgoing 
Cabinet, is known for his large work on '' Church and 



GLADSTONE. 39 

State/'' and Pantaleone, senator and soldier, has brought 
out an elaborate volume "Against Infallibility/' 

In Germany — the greatest national force of the day 
— every Cabinet has some of its chairs filled by doctors 
of philosophy, and even the generals are trained schol- 
ars. In fact, in this country, where the entire mass of 
the nation has almost a finished education, the political 
leaders must be men of trained intellectual power. 

Compare all this with our own poverty. General 
John A. Dix won some possibly permanent literary 
distinction by a scholarly translation of the "Dies 
Irse." Charles Sumner was a vigorous and polished 
writer. The present Secretary of the Navy has entered 
the field of polemics. There are some New England 
names in politics entitled to be mentioned respectfully 
in the world of letters ; but how brief the list, and how 
meagre for the whole country ! The American legislator's 
education is pretty much confined to votes and voting, 
just that particular field of knowledge which English 
public opinion prohibits its legislator from entering, 
forcing him to relegate all this kind of work to "the 
agent," — a special political institution over here, — as 
incompatible with the standing and character of a law- 
giver. Like the "whip," the "agent" is a distinctive 
feature in English practical politics to which we have no 
direct equivalent. I shall describe them both farther on. 

In the course of conversation Mr. Gladstone grew 
quite eloquent in praise of the work of the successive 
administrations of our government since the war, warm- 
ing almost into enthusiasm as he recounted their achieve- 
ments in reducing the public debt, and asking practical 
questions as to the internal direction of this uniform 
policy through so many administrations^ and as to its 
popular political effects on the country at large. The 
well-considered, almost scientific character of these in- 
quiries showed how thoroughly Mr. Gladstone has 
studied and how closely he has followed our course in 
this matter. Indeed, he has made great practical 

8* 



90 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

political use of it, from session to session, for some 
years, in fighting the Conservative jmrty. 

It was the ambition of Mr. Gladstone as leader of 
the Ministry of 1868-74 to follow in a modest way our 
lead in this direction, and he did grapple directly with 
the national debt of England, — monster as it is, — and 
initiated a very promising movement towards its dimi- 
nution. Since his outgoing the movement has not been 
carried on, but I have no doubt the attempt will be re- 
newed under his present administration. 

In truth, in a general way Mr. Gladstone is rather 
extravagantly laudatory of our country, standing up 
stoutly to all the assertions in his recent famous "" Next 
of Kin" article, so complacently received on our side 
of the water, so severely criticised on this. I told him 
frankly I thought he had done us some substantial harm 
by this brilliant paper, as our national sense of self- 
sufficiency is not, as a rule, in need of stimulant, but 
he avers that we were entitled to all he said. 

Mr. Gladstone has unquestionably made a close study 
of our public men and measures of late years, and takes 
heart for England from our achievements, believing 
that the two great popular governments of the English- 
speaking peoples of the w^orld must move in the same 
direction, and that what one can achieve the other can 
do. He has a familiar knowledge of the interior work- 
ing of our political system, and of the work and char- 
acter of our really prominent men, — the men whose 
speeches have shown thought enough to catch the ear 
of foreign statesmen. 

Mr. Gladstone avers that our national integrity in 
the payment of our public debt — the efforts both of the 
people and of administrations made to this end — is 
something unprecedented in political history. To this 
point he returned again and again with unflagging in- 
terest, inquiring whether the nation never grew restive 
under the continued pressure of taxation, — whether it 
was made a leading issue in the campaign before the 



GLADSTONE. 91 

people, — and expressing his renewed admiration for the 
courage and integrity of the leaders who carried it 
through, and of the people who are capable of such 
things. 

Mr. Gladstone, whom I met in the fall of 1879, 
when he was out of office, was kind enough to go at 
some length into the party situation of the hour, re- 
vealing his mental and political cast in this unstudied 
conversation, following its own drift, far better than in 
an elaborate speech or article. He has all the essential 
fibre of republicanism. He has that faith in the 
people which it is so hard to find in a country where 
society rests on a foundation of sharply-distinct and 
separated classes. He is, as a consequence, the instinc- 
tive enemy of imperialism and all it tends to and longs 
for, hating its dreams and ventures with a hearty 
hatred. He believes thorouo;:hlv in movement forward, 
which, for an old man in an old country, is a sign of a 
very young heart. The very atmosphere of Europe is 
depressing and calculated to make one lose faith in 
human progress. Indeed, I have noticed that even the 
American domiciled long in the Old World loses insen- 
sibly that sense of the recognition of a common man- 
hood in all men which is a part of our inheritance. 

Mr. Gladstone out of office was as much a power as 
in. The Marquis of Hartington was the technical 
leader of the Opposition, and did really ''drive the politi- 
cal machine" on the floor of the House of Commons, but 
Mr. Gladstone was the heart of the party, the power 
around which the intelligence and personal confidence 
of liberal England gathered, as the parliamentary cam- 
paign of 1880 abundantly demonstrated. To-day he 
is again at the head of the England that is making 
history. 

" Free trade" is a popular political enthusiasm or 
sentiment with the Englishman, something like the 
instinctive assertion of the Monroe doctrine with us, 
and in this matter Mr. Gladstone is the prophet of his 



92 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

people. For it he Las labored all his life, and has a 
word, in season or out, to be cast on good soil or barren. 

During this visit the subject had not come up, but 
at the door of the room, after having shaken hands, it 
seemed to strike Mr. Gladstone suddenly, and, coming 
out into the hall, he resumed conversation earnestly on 
this new tack, firing out some facts and arguments from 
a thoroughly unstudied and unconventional position 
over the banisters. 

" Oh ! I want to say a word, frankly and heartily, 
as we English always do : Why do you persist in your 
illogical policy of protection ?'' etc., etc. '^ You Ameri- 
cans are having everything your own way ; you are 
competing against us all the time in manufactures; 
you will beat us finally in the long run. Why luill 
you retard your own progress f 

" Well, Mr. Gladstone, I come from a city of manu- 
facturers, and we are perfectly satisfied with our rate 
of progress ; in fact, our great national danger is always 
of going ahead too fast, and the very best policy for us 
is one that does retard us a little.^' 

And the momentary colloquy closed as discussions on 
this subject always do. 

London. 



CHAPTER X. 

AN ENGLISH ELECTION. 

Fixing the Time oe Battle — The Briee Campaign — Ee- 
TURNiNG A Member — Meeting of the Electors — Con- 
testing A Seat — JSTature and Cost of the Expenses op 
AN English Parliamentary Election — The English- 
woman AT THE Polls — Woman and Society in Politics. 

An English parliamentary election is so different 
from ours, and the differences show so sharply some 



AN ENGLISH ELECTION 93 

of the divergences in practice of our two political 
systems, which are so similar on paper, so dissimilar in 
fact, that they can best be developed and contrasted in 
describing the practical process of returning a member. 

In the first place, the time of holding elections 
is not fixed by law, but depends on the will of either 
one or the other party, — an immense tactical advantage 
for wdiichever party is able to secure it. When Parlia- 
ment dissolves, an immediate election is held for the 
next one. The party in power can dissolve wdienever 
they wnsh, if there is any reason so to do. Disraeli 
was watching, for instance, the whole of the year 1879 
for a desirable opportunity to dissolve the Parliament 
whose limitation of seven years was expiring, ready to 
do so at whatever moment he deemed the public mind 
was in a favorable condition to return a Conservative 
majority in the next. But wiiile the party in power 
have the first shot for this great chance of fixing the 
time of battle, the Opposition, if it should find itself 
strong enough to defeat the Ministry, can bide its time 
for that, and force a dissolution, and the consequent elec- 
tion of a new Parliament at the moment of its choice. 
In either case the election takes place at the will of 
the management of either one or the other party, and 
is not at stated periods fixed beforehand by law. 

In the second place, when an election comes the 
struggle is immediate, short, and sharp. Ten to twenty 
days is full time for a national political campaign in 
England. In that brief time all the work is done, and 
the struggle is over, — this, too, in a country where the 
public pulse does not beat nearly so fast as with us, and 
where ideas travel very slowly. From London to 
Edinburgh is in railway time about the distance from 
New York to Pittsburgh, but an idea will travel from 
Maine to California ten times faster than from Surrey 
to Scotland. Nevertheless, the Englishman puts through 
his political campaigns ten times more rapidly than 
we do. 



94 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

The process of an election^ or as they call it here 
" returning a member," is in this wise : When the 
time comes, either by a general dissolution or by cause 
of a special vacancy, a writ goes out from Westminster 
to each constituency (American, election district) to send 
forthwith, or within a certain brief time mentioned, the 
member or members which constitute its representation 
as fixed by law. This election district is not as with 
us a given number of population temporarily defined 
for that purpose. It is a borough, a county, a city, a 
university that has at one time or another acquired the 
right to a certain representation. This writ goes out 
to the returning officer, who is generally the head of 
the election district whatever it be, the mayor of a city, 
the high sheriff of a county. 

This returning officer immediately calls a public 
meeting of the legal electors to send a member. This 
meeting takes place, I believe, generally about two 
days after the reception of the writ. The returning 
officer who called it presides. Any elector may there 
nominate a member. The nomination is generally 
made by the most prominent and influential gentleman 
in the county or borough. If it is seconded by four 
other gentlemen, so that five electors join in proposing, 
the nomination is duly and fully made. The presiding 
officer waits a due interval to hear if any other nomi- 
nations are proposed, and, if none are, he then and there 
declares that the nominee proposed is duly returned, 
and issues to him at once his certificate, and the whole 
thing is over. 

Should there, however, be any other candidates, their 
friends immediately put them in nomination, the names 
of five electors in each case being;; needed to brino;* a 
name before the meeting. When two or more have 
been so nominated the presiding officer announces that 
the electors have failed to make any return and that 
their choice must be decided by a ballot, and he fixes a 
day for taking this ballot, generally from two to ten 



AN ENGLISH ELECTION. 95 

days from the meeting. The ballot is therefore only a 
contingency in an English election, and not the sonl of 
it, as with as. In ancient times it hardly came into 
play at all, and even in the general election of 1880 
very many members were returned without its use. 

This appeal to the ballot is what in England is called 
contesting a county or borough. "A contest" in Eng- 
land is not a scrutiny of the vote as with us, but exactly 
what we call ^^ running" for any office. 

Before any candidate, however, is declared duly in 
nomination, he must, if there is this contest, give bond 
to the returning officer, with two good securities, for 
his share of the costs of the election. The terms and 
amount of this bond are in the judgment of tlie return- 
ing officer. If the candidate cannot give it, his nomina- 
tion drops. Up to this time the proceedings have cost 
nothing. If there has been no contest, the gentleman 
nominated has a seat in Parliament without the expendi- 
ture of a cent. 

With the "contest" or running, how^ever, the work 
gets serious. This bond is the check-rein to individual 
political ambition in England. A member of Par- 
liament receives no salary ; the costs of obtaining a 
seat by an election average at the least five thousand 
dollars ; should Parliament dissolve in thirty days after 
it convenes, as is perfectly possible, the seat is gone and 
all is lost. 

It is ahvays a mystery to an American politician wdiy 
the expenses of an English election are so heavy, and 
what they can be. I think the general belief among 
us is that this five thousand dollars — and it sometimes 
goes up to twenty-five thousand dollars or over — 
is simply a bribery and corruption fund, but it is not so 
necessarily, and hardly ever directly. In England an 
election is an affiiir of the candidates entirely, and not 
of the people, as with us. They hold it and conduct it, 
and not the state. Out of their own pockets, therefore, 
they must provide for all the expenses. They pay for 



96 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

the printing of the tickets and all blanks and forms, 
for the hiring of watchers, inspectors, and clerks, and 
for the rent of all the polling-places, which in a large 
district, as in some parts of London, mav be enormous. 
These expenses they share among themselves, and it is 
to mutually secure these that the bond is given. 

There are also other individual expenses which are 
legitimate, and which are special to England. The 
lower-class Englishman has not that taste for politics 
which is inbred with us, and great exertion is needed 
to ^^get out the vote,'' which is always light contrasted 
with our polling. Now, the most delicate attention 
you can pay the English voter is to haul him to the 
polls in an open two-horse barouche. The lower-grade 
vote generally insists on this, and as a consequence the 
outlay for carriages is always a tremendous item in a 
candidate's bill. A carriage for an election day also is 
apt to cost more than for any other day in the year. 

Again, tlie canvass in England is conducted through 
" agents," whose functions will be explained farther on. 
These agents are generally local attorneys. As many 
are used as may be needed, and gradually the custom 
is spreading of having more and more, until now I am 
assured that in a rural election the entire local bar is often 
divided between the opposing candidates. These at- 
torneys' fees, too, are sometimes regulated on the same 
principle as are the bills of the livery-stable keepers. 
There is no trouble at all spending the five thousand 
dollars — when one understands the customs of the 
country. 

Finally, the count of the vote is made by the candi- 
dates themselves, and not by the state. On their mutual 
report of the result the returning officer makes out his 
certificate. 

The most novel feature, however, by all odds, of an 
English election to American eyes is the presence of 
women in it, and the active part they take in the can- 



AN ENGLISH ELECTION. 97 

vass. There is no Duchess of Devonshire to kiss the 
butchers nowadays, but the ladies of England freely 
lend their charms to the adornment of the hustings all 
the kingdom over, and take a personal share and intel- 
ligent sympathy in the work. The wife, mother, and 
sisters of the candidate, and sometimes his cousins 
and his aunts and his friends, appear on the platform 
with him, or ride in open carriages with him and his 
party from point to point during the canvass of a city, 
or on the critical day of the polling, and their names, 
movements, and appearance are duly chronicled in the 
daily prints. Gladstone's wife and daughters it will be 
remembered were with him through all his wonderful 
invasion of Scotland, and they also " assisted" his son 
in his contest for an English seat. A youthful Lord 
Ramsey ran on the Liberal ticket for Liverpool during 
my stay in the country. His young wife accompanied 
him everywhere, and her presence really seemed to be 
popularly his strong point. The Liberal papers referred 
editorially again and again to " this interesting couple,'^ 
and kept the picture steadily before the people. It 
evidently was a political force. The canvass of a 
county whose political control is in the hands of a great 
family, may be almost a kind of picnic. The candidate 
drives out every day from the castle with a brilliant 
party of lords and ladies, and if he is fortunate speaks 
on the platform from the centre of a bouquet of 
countesses and Honorable Marys, — a lovely kind of 
election committee forever out of the reach of an Ameri- 
can politician. On occasions the candidate and his 
friends who speak with him appear in evening dress 
and with bouquetsat the button-holes, — a proceeding that 
would be rather desperate here. In England society 
is a power in politics ; here it is something which the 
average voter resents. 

The women of course enter into politics with that 
charming disregard for principles and regard for men 
which is so pleasing a characteristic of the sex every- 



98 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

where, and their participation lends a piquant flavor to a 
political campaign entirely lost to us. The politics, like 
the Church, of an old family, however, is generally a 
matter of descent. 

It is not likely that this phase of political life will 
ever obtain here. In England politics enters into the 
very fibre of society, and is part of the social structure. 
The family is the unit of society there, and not the 
individual, as with us. The government of the king- 
dom up to this time has been entirely a matter of 
certain great families, — part of their property and 
occupation, — and naturally all the family take an in- 
terest in it. Gentlemen — the young sons of peers or 
influential county families — as little able to do any 
political work as school-girls themselves, also often go 
around with the party, lending the influence of the 
family and name by their presence. It is something 
like sending the empty family-carriage to a funeral, but 
it does the work with the English voter. 

Englishwomen, it should be added, by the force of 
this kind of education learn, after a fashion, a good deal 
of politics, and have a knowledge of public affairs and 
take an interest in their country which the American 
woman does not. When a girl can help her lover into 
Parliament, which, in England, means something much 
more than going to Congress here, or a married woman 
can distribute secretaryships or curacies for social vas- 
salage faithfully performed, politics becomes fully as 
interesting as dancing or millinery. 

London. 



THE INTERROGATION POINT IN POLITICS. 99 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE INTERROGATION POINT IN POLITICS. 

An English Usage — The Government at the Bar of the 
House of Commons — The Member at the Bar of the 
People. 

There is one practical point in British politics so 
unlike anything in our own, and so marked in their 
system, permeating it from top to bottom, that it is 
worthy of special presentment. It is the usage of 
interrogation. 

From first to last, the Government to the House of 
Commons, the members of the House to their respective 
constituencies, are always on the stand, bound to an- 
swer clearly and explicitly any question asked in good 
faith and in the language of gentlemen. Information 
from the Government to the people is not, as with us, 
given in lengthy argumentative messages or elaborate 
speeches, but daily, and in brief, direct replies to spe- 
cific inquiries. It is simple question and answer, as 
plain and unequivocal as the talk between two men on 
a matter of business. 

This usage probably grows out of the admitted 
candor and straightforwardness of the British char- 
acter, which loves simplicity and directness and honors 
them, and which hates indirectness and concealment. 

I can best illustrate this point of practical politics by 
describing briefly its mode of use in the two instances 
in which it is brought into most marked prominence, 
— viz., the interrogation of the Government in the 
House of Commons, and of the representative, or 
" member," as he is here called, when he appears before 
his constituency from year to year, either to stand for 



100 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

election or report to his county the action of the House 
during its expired session. 

In Parliament there is one distinctive feature to which 
there is nothing of parallel or analogy in our Congress. 
When you enter the House of Commons the object 
which perhaps strikes you first is "the treasury bench," 
a large, solid table-desk, covered with papers, and 
standing directly in front of the Speaker's desk. If 
you are acquainted with the personnel of the politics 
of the day, you see around this table the familiar 
features of the leading ministers, — the Ministry of 
England, the Cabinet of our Government. They are 
there with their briefs and data, and sometimes with 
clerks to answer squarely and directly and imuiediately 
such questions as may be put to them by the represen- 
tatives of the people. This is done daily, I might 
almost say hourly. Sometimes, indeed, a whole session 
may be simply a fire of question and answer, — the ques- 
tions a brief sentence or two, carefully framed, the 
answers equally short and well weighed, for on these 
answers the Government must stand. It cannot shelter 
itself behind a mountain of words. 

On this right to demand of the Government full and 
explicit information on any subject at any time there 
are no limitations by law. There are limitations, how- 
ever, necessarily, by usage. The same love of fair play 
which. has evolved this system of interrogation demands 
that, in matters so weighty as affairs of state, fair and 
due notice shall be given of the question to be asked. 
An immature or hasty answer might be injurious to the 
best interests of the country, and, besides, would not be 
entitled to the weight and consideration of one duly 
matured and carefully framed. 

Accordingly, it has grown into a usage that the 
questions to the Ministry shall be submitted to them 
in writing at least one day before the answer is de- 
i^anded. The questions are, therefore, generally handed 
into the treasury bench on the floor of Parliament the 



THE INTERROGATION POINT IN POLITICS. IQl 

day before an answer is publicly asked on the floor. 
Sometimes they are read aloud, and sometimes only 
quietly handed to one of the ministers in the most 
informal way, pencilled on a bit of paper, the back of 
an envelope, or anything that comes to hand. 

There being no limitation by law, any member of 
course, if he chooses, may spring any question without 
a moment's notice, and demand a snap answer. This 
however, is considered ^^ bad form,'' only injures the 
individual who attempts it, and the public sense of 
fairness justifies the minister in declining to reply until 
he has had proper time. I have seen this done, and 
am satisfied that the ^' smart" member who attempted 
it only hurt himself; and, in truth, the minister's dig- 
nified refusal to return any answer until he could give 
one worthy of a responsible Government was applauded 
by the Opposition as well as by the Right. 

The Ministry, again, may decline to answer any 
question when, in their judgment, the answer would 
be detrimental to the interests of the nation at that 
time. This is, the same as with us, a right which 
must be exercised judiciously as well as honestly. 

Lastly, the questions must, of course, be put in good 
faith and couched in respectful language. The buf- 
foonery which so often obtains at Harrisburg or the 
rough vulgarity of Albany would simply put its users 
out of the doors at Westminster. 

It is on the hustings, however, that this custom of 
interrogation takes its most striking and popular form. 
There the member answers to his constituency face to 
face in their home, just as the Government answers to 
the members in the House. The same general rules as 
to notice, good faith, respectful language, etc., prevail 
as on the floor of Parliament, relaxed a little, perhaps, 
by the popular character of the assembly and place. 
It is deemed better, on the whole, not to notice a vul- 
garity on the stump, — or perhaps to cautiously call 

attention to it, — but to go on and answer the question 

9- 



102 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

anyhow. These questions take the widest possible 
range, and are always intensely practical. What are 
the member's views on the Eastern question, and on 
"farmers' rights" and *' game-laws" at home? How 
did he vote on the Indian appropriation, and how were 
his tenant-leases drawn this spring? What are his 
views on shooting rabbits or burying dissenters? 
The candidate, or member, is sometimes owner of half 
the county, and half the voters are his tenants. There 
is great latitude in these interrogations, and some of 
them are very curious and personal. They illustrate 
thoroughly, however, the campaign, and enable a 
stranger to understand the situation rapidly, and better 
than he would from listening to a dozen of one- or 
two-hour speeches. 

There are advantages and disadvantages to this sys- 
tem on which I have not room at this time to dwell, 
but which every expert in practical politics will readily 
see for himself. In England the dangers of the prac- 
tice are largely lessened by that spirit of fair play and 
directness which animates the nation and governs all 
its popular assemblies. There would be danger in 
many parts of our country that freedom of interroga- 
tion would degenerate into license and insolence, which 
would be thoughtlessly applauded. 

The advantages are very great. It tends to check 
sophomoric speech-making ; it brings the representative 
and his constituent in direct and very satisfactory re- 
lation ; it clears up popular doubt or uncertainties, be- 
cause the issues are framed in popular form by the 
voter, not for him, and answered direct Yes or No ; it 
lets the member know clearly what his constituents 
want, and on what issues they are interested ; and, 
lastly, it is essentially democratic. The Government 
is always at the bar of the House, and the House is 
always at the bar of the people. 

LoNDoisr. 



COMPARATIVE COST OF GOVERNMENT. 103 



CHAPTER XII. 

COMPARATIVE COST OF GOVERNMENT. 

Government Salaries in England and the United States 
— Expenditures, Taxes, and Debts — The Money Economy 
OF Kepublics. 

There is a certain element of ignorance and discon- 
tent in our country which is always complaining of the 
extravagance and cost of our republican Government, 
national, State, and municipal, and flippantly referring 
to European Governments, most generally that of Eng- 
land, as being something better, more satisfactory and 
economical. I propose to show the folly of this kind 
of talk, not by any argument, but simply by citing 
some facts which will illustrate the cost of government 
abroad. 

I quote England, because, first, that kingdom is most 
frequently held up to us as an example ; and, secondly, 
because it is a constitutional Government of large free- 
dom, and the circumstances of comparison with our- 
selves are, therefore, fairer. 

The Lord Mayor of London receives a salary of 
$50,000 a year and a fine residence, — the historic 
" Mansion House" of the city, — -just what we give the 
President of the United States. 

The young Marquis of Lome, as governor-general 
of Canada, receives a salary of $50,000 a year and a 
residence ; again just what we pay our highest officer. 

The English ambassador at Paris receives a salary 
the same as that of our President, $50,000 a year, as 
also does the lord high chancellor. 

The money cost of our chief executive is, therefore, 
only that of a whole class of officials, say, of third-rate 



104 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

rank and importance in this monarchy and empire. We 
beo^in our scale of salaries at their third degree. 

The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland receives a: salary of 
£20,000, or $100,000 a year, for governing a small state 
with less than six million inhabitants. He gets, also, in 
[addition, $35,000 more in salaries for his household, — 
not an official household, but a personal one, — chamber- 
lain, ushers, ^' gentlemen-at-large,'^ master of the horse, 
gentlemen of the bedchamber, etc. This official starts 
with just twice the salary of our President and ten 
times that of the governor of Pennsylvania. 

The Prince of Wales for serving tlie state in ^^ that 
station to which it has pleased God to call'^ him, gets 
$200,000, — four times what is paid by us for the ser- 
vices of a chief ruler. 

The Queen of England for the royal family — her- 
self, her children, and her relatives — receives from the 
state annuities amounting to the total sum of £547,000 
— say $2,735,000. We have no charge, burden, or out- 
lay of any kind with which to compare this. 

The " Church Establishment" is another political 
tax with which we have nothing to place in comparison, 
and is a very substantial item to the taxpayer. The 
Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, is paid $75,- 
000 per year; the Archbishop of York, $50,000 per 
year ; the Bishop of London, also, $50,000 a year, — up 
to and over our Presidential grade. The bulk of the 
bishops, however, — there are twenty-eight, — receive but 
from $20,000 to $25,000 per year. 

As an incidental evidence of the comparative scale 
of cost of British Government, I may mention that the 
English minister to Switzerland receives from his coun- 
try a salary more than twice as large as that received 
by the president of the Swiss republic hitnself. The 
British minister at Washington also receives $30,000 a 
year, three-fifths of our President's salary, and more 
than the salary President Lincoln was paid. 

Castles and palaces, sometimes furnished, and with 



COMPARATIVE COST OF GOVERNMENT. 105 

even the silver provided, are '' thrown in" with these 
generous allowances. 

The British Cabinet officers receive generally |25,000 
against our $8000 for the same duty. 

Now for the " territories/' or provincial possessions, 
of England. The governor of Ceylon receives $35,000 
per year ; the governor of New South Wales, the same ; 
the governor of Victoria, an Australian province, $50,- 
000 ; the governor of New Zealand, $37,500 ; the gov- 
ernor of Jamaica, $35,000, and Sir Bartle Frere, in 
Africa, has been getting $30,000; and so the list might 
be extended in all quarters of the globe. Compare this 
with our modest territorial budget. 

But let us come to some departments of expendi- 
tures not personal and contrast our burdens. 

Take a single item. The estimate of appropriations 
asked for the army for this year by the Conservative 
administration was over $75,000,000. This sum has 
already been exceeded, it is believed, by about 33 per 
cent., making the cost of the army this year $100,000,- 
000 or over. And this is cheap for Europe, for the 
English army is a small one when compared with the 
continental masses of legions. In France the military 
burden is worse, and in Germany it is appalling. 

The amount asked for the English navy for the 
current year is £10,860,901,— nearly $55,000,000. 
This one sum of naval cost is more than our entire 
*^ civil service and miscellaneous'^ expenditure for 1878. 
Or put it this way: The cost of the army and navy to 
England for one year is about equal to all our current 
expenses of all kinds, saving the item of interest on the 
public debt. 

There is always some difficulty in getting the exact 
expenditures of the English Government, but the reve- 
nues raised in 1879 from the kingdom alone — the small 
territories of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and 
not the empire of foreign possessions — amounted to £83,- 
000,000, or about $415,000,000. As England is con- 



106 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

stantly going deeper into debt, this sum represents some 
millions less than her expenditures. Our national ex- 
penditure, including interest on the public debt, was, 
for the year ending June 30, 1879, $261,000,000. In 
other words, our cost of government is but three-fifths 
of that of the English, while our population is one-third 
more, and our area of territory is twenty-five times as 
great. 

The final proof, however, in the comparative bur- 
den of government will be found in the public debts of 
the two countries. It is they which represent the sum 
of costs and the weight. Here the contrast is sharp : 
our national debt is sometliing under two billions of 
dollars, and is diminishing, and England's national debt 
is £777,781,590, the enormous sum of almost four 
billions of dollars, and increasing. As a matter of fact, 
they count it now only by the interest, which, in 1878, 
at their low rates, amounted to £28,412,750. The 
country has lost all hope of paying off the principal ; 
but that is not the worst, — it is not keeping it down; 
and in that is seen the weight of the burden of the cost 
of government, which is greater than the people can or 
will bear. Since 1862, when the interest on the debt 
was £26,000,000, there has been a steady and gradual 
rise, sometimes halting for a year or .experiencing an 
inappreciable diminution, it is true, but never holding 
the gain, until it now stands at over £28,000,000. 

And now, how is all this to be met? This is the 
individual question for our grumblers to confront. 
The Englishman staggers under taxes of which we 
happily know nothing at all, or very little, — a searching 
income-tax, to begin with, stamp acts and excise, probate 
and customs levies. Many of these are of heavy weight 
when contrasted with ours, even under the pressure of 
war. The probate of a poor man's will costs two per 
cent, on the sum proved. A tax answering;; to our 
" collateral inheritance" statute lays a levy of one per 
cent, on direct or lineal succession,— -?*.e., the passage of 



COMPARATIVE COST OF GOVERNMENT. 107 

property from father to son. When the legatee is 
farther out than a grancl-uncle or aunt, this tax rises to 
ten per cent. Patents for inventions cost $25 at every 
step, the final issuing of the patent costing from |250 
to $500 in addition. There are pro-rata taxes on in- 
surance policies, on every lease, on mortgages, on con- 
veyances, on settlements, on bonds, on covenants and 
bills of exchange and bank-notes. Then there are 
stamp-taxes, — a tax on every receipt given for a sum 
over $10, on licenses, on houses, on liquors. An at- 
torney must pay down $250 to the state on his admis- 
sion as barrister; a notary public, $150 on receiving his 
commission. You pay $2.50 for the privilege of carrying 
a gun, and $3.75 for the right to call yourself a servant 
and hire out as one ; a marriage-license costs S10.50, and, 
if you want to marry without previous residence in the 
parish or district, the special license costs $150. 

This list might be extended almost indefinitely. I 
only cite a few instances at hand to illustrate the weight 
of taxation in a well-governed European state, and 
how it presses in on the individual, annoying, hamper- 
ing, and embarrassing him at every point and turn. 

In fact, we have no idea at all in our fortunate 
country of what taxation in Europe is. In Italy, for 
instance, a country where the vast mass of the people 
are wretchedly poor, — so poor that one who has not 
seen them can have no conception of their poverty, — 
the annual expenditure of the national Government is 
greater than ours, and there are but 27,000,000 people 
to raise it from, instead of 45,000,000, as in our case. 
The taxation to meet it requires a levy of over $10 
per head. As a sample of their powder to bear 
taxation, I may mention that there is an income-tax of 
thirteen per cent., which is deducted from even a for- 
eigner's interest on an Italian Government security. 

It is to be said in favor of England, at least, that, 
while the people pay high for public service, they get 
good work, — a better return than we do. Their public 



108 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

work is very thorough, and the grade of the public 
servant higher than with us. All this insures a certain 
economy in the long run, and inures to the stability of 
government and the good of the community. 

I am not writing to this question, however. Ours 
is better for the cost than theirs is for their cost. It is 
likely that we both err, — they in having too costly a 
public service, we in demanding too cheap a one. The 
point I want to make is the immense cheapness of gov- 
ernment under our system as compared with that of any 
other. It would be better if we would pay a better price 
for all public service and demand a better service, more 
solid work, and a higher class of men to do it, — men 
of education, character, and responsibility. 

These things, however, are other questions, and open 
up endless argument in a hundred directions. The one 
point we are considering now is the immediate cheap- 
ness of republican government. It is rather fashion- 
able among a certain class of people to be forever de- 
claiming about the wastefulness, cost, and extravagance 
of a government carried on by the people, and not by 
a special class trained or born to the work. I maintain 
that a people's government is the cheapest on earth, and 
the republics of the United States and Switzerland and 
France are the proofs. An analysis of the national 
administration of France will show that all those de- 
partments of the Government which are new and dis- 
tinctly republican are managed cheaply or at a mode- 
rate cost to the nation. Those departments which are 
yet run in the old monarchic grooves, as the diplomatic 
corps, for instance, are costly. Switzerland, a republic 
with a population of 3,000,000, has a yearly govern- 
mental expenditure of $8,500,000; the 4,000,000 of 
economical Hollanders, who indulge, however, in the 
luxury of a monarch, spend $50,000,000. 

In fact, economy is an incident of republican 
government. 

LONDOK. 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 109 



CHAPTER XIII. 



PARLIAMENT. 



Political Topography of the House of Commons — Sitting 
IN Line of Battle — Plan of the House — Taking the 
.Ayes and Noes by a Human Count — Sanctity of the 
Floor — The "Whip." 

Through the attention of one of the leaders of the 
Conservatives, the party in power in England at tlie 
time of my seeing it, I enjoyed the courtesy of seeing 
the House of Commons from its own floor. Tin's is 
rather an exceptional privilege and a very desirable one ; 
the strangers' gallery, which is cramped and closely 
enough guarded too, giving one a view of only half the 
house, and a very unsatisfactory one at that. 

Everything in England preaches history if you have 
ears to hear and a mind to understand, and this jealous 
guarding of the privacy of Parliament comes down as 
a usage from troublous times when, if the chamber of 
the House of Commons had been open to visitors, im- 
proper influences might have controlled the action of its 
members. Even now the chance presence of the Prince 
of Wales in the galleries is absurdly remarked on, and 
so great is the sanctity of the floor of the House of 
Commons that the messengers and servants of the House 
itself dare not tread on it when the House is in session. 
If a message is brought to it from the House of Peers, 
the messenger advances to the bar of the House, — an 
imaginary barrier supposed to be swung across the floor 
from the ends of the lower benches on each side of the 
room, — and it is there taken from him by the clerk or 
a member and conveyed to the Speaker's desk. In the 

same way, if you send in your card to a member, no 

lb 



110 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

page or servant delivers it at his seat. This messenger 
again halts at the bar. The nearest member, seeing it 
is a private message, takes it and passes it on until it 
reaches your friend or acquaintance. This service of 
courtesy the members hourly do for each other rather 
than suffer a sacred old form to be infringed on or 
weakened. 

The reserved place on the floor which the modern 
centuries have wrested from the old fear and conservative 
tradition is a small compartment capable of seating 
seven persons, or eight if they squeeze. It is on the 
floor of the House, but carefully railed off from the 
members' seats. You can communicate with the mem- 
bers, however, who are in the habit of coming up to 
the ^^ reservation" and speaking with their friends across 
the railing. Admission to this bench is given only on 
the special order of the Speaker in each case. When once 
you are in this intimate inclosure, which in appearance 
much resembles the prisoners' dock in our county court- 
rooms, you have an excellent view of the whole house 
and everything that is going on. You can see every- 
thing and hear everything. In the galleries, a large 
portion of the time, you can do neither. 

On taking my seat inside of this modern and very 
moderate indentation into the British constitution I was 
amused to see how very thoroughly the American was 
there. The theory of this '^ private bench" is that it is 
a place where members may have an opportunity to 
speak to and see influential personages of the kingdom 
whom they ought to be able to consult or communicate 
with without leaving the chamber. Of the persons who 
occupied the bench this evening of which I write, one 
was an ex-senator of the United States, a second an 
American doctor of divinity, a third an ex-Cabinet min- 
ister of the United States, and another of the two re- 
maining was certainly a fellow-citizen, but I did not 
know him. Five of the seven seats were thus held by 
the Yankee, — a small army of occupation. 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, m 

Strangers, however, whether favored with the " dock 
on the floor'^ or less fortunate with a seat in the dekisive 
galleries, can hardly complain of their accommodations 
from a House which has not accommodated itself. 

It is a literal fact that there are not seats enough in 
the House of Commons to seat its own members should 
they all attend at one time. In this House there 
are six hundred and seventy-eight members, and there 
are seats for but four hundred and seventy-six. By the 
usage of tiie House, therefore, no member is entitled to 
his seat unless he is in at prayers, — a rule which has 
something of a schoolboy sound to us. Indeed, the 
schoolboy atmosphere of the House, to which I shall 
again refer, is very marked, and forces itself on one's 
thought all the time. 

The whole matter of seating is very different from 
ours, and conditions the appearance of the House, the 
habit and style of speaking, and, to some extent, the 
usage and course of procedure. In truth, the political 
parties sit in line of battle. I will attempt to make it 
as clear as possible. 

In the first place, there are no desks or tables for the 
members, — nothing but long rows of red-cushioned 
benches, four tiers, I think, of them rising from the 
floor. 

These benches run along the two sides of the room 
in straight lines. The room is a long rectangle, with 
the Speaker's and clerks' desks at the one end of it, the 
general door at the other. The rows of benches start 
from the upper end of the room, " right" and '' left'^ 
from the Speaker's desk, running down almost to the 
door. An imaginary line drawn from the lower end 
of the benches across the room is " the bar.'^ These 
long parallel rows of benches are divided again in the 
middle by a narrow aisle running up from the lower 
tier to the higiiest, for purposes of access. This is 
called ^' the gangway." 

The members of the Government party always sit in 



112 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

the tiers of benclies to the right of the Speaker, and are 
known as " the Right." The members of the Opposi- 
tion party all sit in the benches to the left of the 
Speaker, and are known as " the Left/' The party 
forces are thus always massed on the floor and face 
each other. These grand parliamentary divisions of 
"Right" and '^Left" are further brigaded by the ^' gang- 
way-line," the regulars sitting " above the gangway" 
and the irregulars of either side sitting " below the 
gangway." For instance, to-day the straight-out Con- 
servatives, who have the government, sit on the right 
above the gangway. The independent Conservatives, 
on whom they can generally depend, but not always, 
sit below them, — i.e., on the right side below the gang- 
way. The straight-out Liberals, or Opposition, sit on 
the left above the gangway, the extreme Liberals, or 
Radicals, just below them, — i.e., on the left below the 
gangway. 

This custom divides the floor to the eye into four 
distinct political divisions, and one can always see at a 
glance how a vote at the moment would stand. It 
certainly has this advantage. 

The leaders of each party, again, always sit on the 
front bench of their respective sides ^^ above the gang- 
way," and thus face each other. Thus, to-day, on one 
short bench on the right, sit Sir Stafibrd Northcote, 
Colonel Stanley, secretary of state for war, Mr. Cross, 
etc., leaders of the Right, who, of .course, are the Min- 
istry, and facing them, pn another small bench, the 
Marquis of Hartington, the official " leader" of the 
Opposition, William Ewart Gladstone, Mr. Foster, 
John Bright, Robert Lowe. The election which took 
place as these sketches were being prepared for publi- 
cation has just reversed these seats. 

Between these two " benches of leaders" is placed a 
large, substantial, square office-desk table with solid 
sides and drawers to the floor. This is strictly the 
clerk's table, but as the clerical officials of the House 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 113 
UPPEK END. 



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LOWER END. 

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114 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

are not conspicuous, and the right at least of this table 
is occupied by the ministry, with their secretaries and 
papers, this section of the floor is popularly spoken of 
as the treasury bench, although that designation in 
strictness belongs only to the short front bench where 
sit officially the leaders of the Right. 

The space on the floor between the two tiers of right 
and left benches is perhaps fifteen to twenty feet, and 
stretches the entire length of the room. Its uppermost 
boundary is " the treasury bench,'^ its lowermost limit 
" the bar.'' This is the arena, or clear floor, into which 
our members are so fond of getting when they want to 
make a speech and give the nation a full view of them- 
selves. No member of the English Parliament, how- 
ever, dare speak from this space, which is always kept 
clear. It is an established rule of the House, come 
down from the centuries now, and a usage stronger than 
any written regulation, that no member shall address 
the House save from some spot where, if he sat down, 
he would sit down on something. So every member 
must stand to his bench, and most unsatisfactory, awk- 
ward, and uncomfortable places are they to speak from. 
This is undoubtedly a " survival/' as is everything you 
meet liere. 

I furnish a rough draft or diagram which gives at a 
glance a bird's-eye view of the political topography of 
the House of Commons. The knowledge of this, al- 
though apparently an incidental and ancillary matter, 
is very important for a familiar understanding of Eng- 
lish politics, as the ordinary political phraseology is 
based on it, and in speeches and newspaper articles the 
bulk of references to parties, sections, or members is 
made to them not by name, but to the location where 
they sit. 

Sitting on long benches, or pews, with no conveni- 
ences of table or desk, the members, when in the 
chamber, must attend to public business. They cannot 
write private letters or do their committee work during 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 115 

the session, as at Wasliington. Nor can they adorn the 
furniture of the House with their feet. They can, 
however, when bored, read newspapers and sleep, 
although the position for sleeping is not a happy one, 
and gives the sleeper rather a drunken and disjointed 
air. 

The members sit with their hats on, — another his- 
toric survival. This usage comes down as an assertion 
of the dignity and sovereignty of the House that it 
did not have to uncover before any one. As a matter 
of fact, now only about one-half of the House wear 
hats at one time, a member relieving himself appa- 
rently by sometimes wearing and sometimes removing 
his hat. This custom in this century results in any- 
thing but an effect of dignity, particularly when the 
House is half-asleep. In fact, it often gives a rowdy, 
bar-room appearance or tone to the whole room. It 
has, perhaps, one advantage. AVheu a noble lord is 
undergoing a severe attack from the champion of the 
other side, he simply thrusts both hands away down 
into his trousers-pockets, jams his broad-rimmed silk 
hat far down over his eyes, projects his motionless 
crossed legs stiffly forward, and in this statesmanlike 
intrenchment no movement or play of his features can 
betray him. 

In front of the Speaker's table, on a lower desk (not 
in the diagram), used by the clerks, lies a huge golden 
club. It is the mace, — a substantive historic survival, 
and the outward and visible symbol of the power of 
the House. When the House goes out of session and 
sits in committee of the whole the mace is removed 
and slung on rests under the table. 

Whenever a division is taken in the House of Com- 
mons the members are all told off bodily by a most 
clumsy proceeding, a custom which evidently comes 
down from a very ancient and primitive time. All the 
members get up and leave the floor, deserting the cham- 



11 g ENGLISH POLITICS. 

ber absolutely. They are literally poured out into a 
hall, where they separate themselves into two lobbies, 
the ^' ayes" going into one lobby and the "noes" into 
another. From these lobbies they file out, each lobby 
pouring out its contents through its own door between 
a pair of tellers. The vote is thus counted, and there is 
no other way of taking it if the yeas and nays are called 
for. Calling for a division, therefore, is a very serious 
matter in the way of delay. Half a dozen counts may 
consume a whole afternoon or evening session, especially 
if any of the members choose to loiter in the hall or 
lobby. 

By another curious formality, whenever a division 
was called we " visitors of the House" were removed 
from our private dock to an outer chamber, and when 
the ceremony was over brought back again. The 
reason gravely given for this usage is ^^ lest any stranger 
might get mixed with the members and counted." 
During one night I went out thus three times to avoid 
the danger of being pressed in as a British legislator. 

The description of these arrangements — the ma- 
chinery of the House of Commons — has consumed so 
much space, that I postpone to another letter some de- 
scription of the appearance of the House itself and of 
its ways and modes of doing business as compared with 
ours. 

I conclude with some explanation of a human instru- 
ment of machine politics which we do not have on our 
side of the water, in just the same shape, at least, — the 
^^ whip." 

It is the duty of the ^^ whip" to see that the neces- 
sary party " vote" is always on hand in case it should be 
needed either to carry a measure or to prevent an ad- 
journment. An adjournment can always be had here 
if there are less than forty members in their seats and 
any one chooses to call for a count. 

In this land, where parliamentary attendance is so 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 117 

very negligent, the duty of the " whip" is no light one, 
and requires a large amount of tact, knowledge of so- 
ciety and the different social relations of the members, 
prudence, judgment, and sagacity. He must not be 
nervous and detail the members for duty when they are 
not needed. He must not be reckless or over-confident 
or let himself be misled or deceived on the other hand, 
and be found without any forces when the vote is 
called. 

Ev^erything over here if once tried and accepted works 
itself very quickly into shape and becouies an institution. 
The " whip" is now a recognized and well-established 
cog-wheel in British machine politics. He is always 
one of the under-secretaries of the treasury, — I think, 
the second under-secretary. His real work is not the 
treasury business, of course, but the party manage- 
ment and engineering. He has a special office-room in 
the Parliament building, one of the treasury-rooms, 
fitted up for his particular uses and work, with tele- 
graph, messengers, clerks, etc. By courtesy the whip 
of tl>e Opposition has also a room allowed him in the 
building, similarly fitted up, to do his party work in, 
which, to say the least, is very generous of the party 
in power. However, the taxes of the people pay for 
both the rooms. 

When the Opposition come into power their whip is, 
by now-established usage, entitled to the post in the 
new Ministry of second under-secretary of the treasury, 
and thus the machine works smoothly on. 

LONDOX. 



118 ENGLISH POLITICS. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

PARLIAMENT (CONTINUED). 

House of Commons — The Written Constitution and the 
Unwritten Constitution — Two Systems of Representa- 
tion — The Representation of Numbers and the Rep- 
resentation OF Interest — National Construction and 
National Growth — Society in Parliament. 

While the English Parliament and the Congress of 
the United States are fashioned after the same general 
shape, — the former serving, in fact, as the model of the 
latter, — there are essential and fundamental differences 
between them that make all hasty comparisons mislead- 
ing and render the study and practice of English politics 
something very different from that of American politics. 

Both bodies are divided into two Houses, an upper 
and a lower ; both bodies are elective (in the English 
Parliament the seats of the English peers are heredi- 
tary, but the Scotch and Irish peers are elective) ; both 
bodies divide the work in much the same way between 
the two Houses, the lower House controlling the supplies. 
All these general features of resemblance, however, 
only serve to hide the radical differences and mislead 
the superficial observer. 

I shall endeavor briefly, in a running parallel, and in 
the simplest language possible, to point out the funda- 
mental and radical divergencies which exist between 
the Governments of our two great English-speaking 
countries, as administered by their national legislatures, 
and to show in passing how these differences illustrate 
themselves on the floors of Parliament and Congress 
in diverse customs, habits, and modes of procedure. 

To begin with, the controlling organic difference be- 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. HQ 

tween the two nations is the diiference between a 
growth and a construction. This difference underlies 
everything, — government, politics, law, social structure, 
and e very-day habit and usage. England is a growth, 
— we are a structure. You see this in everything you 
look at or consider here, every day and every hour. 
And wherever there is a diiference in the habits, man- 
ners, or customs of the two people you can nearly ahvays 
trace it back to this source and determine it by this as 
a rule. 

First, of course, this comes out in the constitutions, 
— the bottom and foundation law of both countries. 

We all know that ours is a pure construction, a plan 
traced carefully on paper by political draughtsmen for 
the use of political architects. We know that every 
word has been carefully studied and every clause and 
sentence thoughtfully adjusted, — or tried to be adjusted. 
Every word is plainly written, so that every citizen may 
know it. Many of them have been made the subject 
of legal interpretation, — even the punctuation has been 
so considered. Our Constitution in this feature of ab- 
solute and entire construction does not differ froui a 
written contract, an insurance prospectus, or a railway 
company^s charter. 

Our own Constitution being thus rigidly framed and 
fixed on paper, we unconsciously assume that all others 
are also. We hear of the '^ unwritten Constitution" 
of England and assent to it, but I presume the average 
American, nine times out of ten, thinks of this phrase 
loosely as a figure of speech, meaning something, — he 
does not exactly know what. 

As a matter of literal fact, the Constitution of Eng- 
land — the fundamental and greatest and determining 
law of the whole country — is absolutely unwritten. 
Nor is it anywhere or in any way divided into chapters 
and sections and division of topics, as ours. Nor is it, 
of course, indexed. It is a vast body of customs and 
usages, most of which are rights which have grown up, — 



120 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

rights of the crown; rights of the Church and of 
special Churches; rights of classes; rights of Parlia- 
ment and of each House ; rights of persons ; rights of 
colleges, village vestries, abbeys, counties, etc., etc., etc. 
In the chapter of this volume on Westminster Abbey 
there is noted a striking illustration of one of these 
early personal usages grown into a right of national 
proportions. 

The whole body of these rights and usages which 
have grown up from year to year, and from century to 
century, and which are growing yet, is the English Con- 
stitution. They have never been gathered together, 
they have never been recorded ; some of them have 
perhaps never been definitely reduced to rigid words. 
No one in England would do all this for them if he 
could, and no one could, for these rights and usages are 
living things, changing and growing every day, just as 
our own bodies grow by constant hourly change. 

One can think out for himself how this needs affect 
the daily life and work of the courts and of the legisla- 
tures, and of the politicians and the statesmen, and how 
it must make their work diverge from ours. 

While the English House of Commons and our House 
of Representatives are both elected by the people, they 
are elected in an entirely different way, and so as to 
represent in an entirely different way the body and in- 
terests of the nation. Here, again, it is growth and 
construction. 

We choose our representatives to represent purely the 
principle of numbers or population, — if that is a political 
principle at all, — each male over twenty-one years of 
age, and not convicted of infamous crime, be he good 
or bad, educated or uneducated, cultivated or vulgar, 
with property or without property, a valuable citizen 
or a worthless citizen, counting one, and being equally 
represented in an infinitesimal fraction of the member he 
sends to Congress. We represent only the individual, 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 121 

not what he is or may have been. We elect our repre- 
sentatives, too, by a very simple and easy method, and 
in mathematical proportion to the numbers of the pop- 
ulation, everything accurately "constructed," like loga- 
rithms or the tables of a life-insurance company. 

The English system of representation, on the other 
hand, is very complex and very involved, like the un- 
folding leaves of bud and flower and tree. It is a growth, 
various interests and classes having achieved represen- 
tation from time to time as tliey have forced themselves 
forward into notice and power. It is also changing 
every few years, — growing. It could not begin to be 
described in detail within the limits of a letter, being 
elaborate, complicated, and not in any way reduced to 
a simple rule, as ours. There are features in it which 
seem to us to work great inequalities, — at least if we take 
our principle of numbers to be the true one. 

Tlie great difference between the two systems, how- 
ever, may be stated thus : That while we represent di- 
rectly only the individual, the English system undertakes 
to represent directly a large number of the higher in- 
terests of the country. The voter does not vote merely 
as an individual, but for what he is worth to the com- 
munity as nearly as that can be ascertained. 

For instance, education is represented when the uni- 
versities send members to Parliament ; the Church is 
represented when the bishops sit in the House of Peers ; 
classes are represented in the same way ; counties are 
represented when they send members as counties ; 
boroughs are represented when they send members as 
boroughs ; and, finally, property is represented in the 
property qualification, nearly always attached, of the 
voter. As a matter of fact, too, the army and the navy, 
great and important institutions and interests in tliis 
country, are always well represented on the floor of the 
House, — this by the personal choice of the voters, how- 
ever, and not by any direct provision. Labor is rep- 
resented also in the towns which it has built up, — 
r 11 



122 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, — and which send 
members as towns and not by reason of population. 

It will be seen that the members of Congress and the 
members of Parliament go to Washington and West- 
minster in a very different way and represent very 
different things. 

The duties and labors of the English Parliament are 
very vast and onerous as compared with those of the 
Congress at Washington. Our legislative functions 
have been distributed by construction to the State gov- 
ernments and other bodies, while in the gradual groioth 
of centuries all the burdens of the whole nation, and 
latterly of an empire, have been piled up on Parlia- 
ment. Our simple distribution of legislative functions 
is familiar to every one at home. Parliament does, or 
undertakes to do, everything. It debates on the con- 
struction of a bridge across the little Thames one day, 
and the reconstruction of the Indian empire or the con- 
duct of a foreign war or the peace of Europe the next. 
In this respect the machine seems to have broken down 
at present. Everybody, Conservative leader as well as 
Liberal, admits that the business of the House of Com- 
mons is at this moment hopelessly in arrears. It is in 
the condition of a court with an overburdened docket, 
— back, not for terms, but, as is variously estimated, 
from ten to fifty years. 

All these great differences — of organic law, of struc- 
ture, of functions — show themselves clearly, work 
themselves down in the appearance, in the manners 
and usages, and in the mode of proceeding of the two 
great Houses. 

When you first look over the House of Commons 
and contrast it with our House of Representatives, two 
things strilvc you at once. You see, first, that the 
average of years of the representative is higher than 
with us ; and, second, you find a larger proportion to 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 123 

the membership of distinguished men than with lis, — 
men of known ability as soldiers, statesmen, thinkers, 
scholars. 

The first fact is simply the general tendency and 
result of a more highly organized and mature com- 
munity. We send older men from Philadelphia and 
Boston than from the Kickapoo and Oshkosh and 
such-like districts. 

The second fact — the larger presence of strong men 
— is directly traceable to the English system of repre- 
sentation and one of its usages. In the first place, the 
average grade of the voter in England is higher than 
with us, which, of course, raises the grade of the rep- 
resentative. Under the system prevailing now, the 
very ignorant man or the man without any property 
interest in his country at all (unless he have a high 
educational qualification, as on the university lists) is 
pretty surely excluded from the ballot-box. No Tam- 
many legions can be marshalled and marched to the 
polls here; and that is the reason, perhaps, why they 
march in New York rather than in London or Dublin. 

Then it is the happy usage of an English constitu- 
ency to select for their representative the ablest and 
most distinguished man they can get in their kingdom, 
whether he is born inside the parish lines of the district 
or out of them. They want to be represented, not to 
satisfy the claims of Little Peddlington or this or that 
cross-roads section. For instance, in 1865, Mr. Glad- 
stone was returned from South Lancashire, and while 
serving for that district became the leader of the 
Liberal party, succeeding Palmerston. In 1868, South 
Lancashire failed to re-elect him. He was not lost, how- 
ever, either to England or to the party. Greenwich 
immediately asked the honor of his candidacy, returned 
him, and in December, 1868, he was prime minister 
of England. In our country the whole nation would 
have suffered for the ignorance of South Lancashire. 
Again, the Marquis of Hartington^ the new leader of 



124 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

the Liberals, at the recent election, stood in a different 
borough from that which sent him to the previous Par- 
liament. 

This judicious "selection of the fittest" can be made 
in Pennsylvania under our laws, but it is not the cus- 
tom, and the petty feeling of local prejudice is against 
it. The wildest and most barren and meagrely edu- 
cated district in our mountains can send the most dis- 
tinguished lawyer or scholar of Philadelphia to repre- 
sent them in Congress if they want. Had Thaddeus 
Stevens been rejected by Lancaster, the Chester or the 
Bradford or any other strong Republican district could 
have sent him if they had wanted to ; but I suppose 
they would rather have left the House of Representa- 
tives in the crisis of war without its great leader than 
to have done so. 

Another incidental feature of the House which 
immediately strikes an American is the number of 
dress-suits scattered over the room, — the men who have 
been to dinner or are going; for "society" here is 
always distinctly represented in Parliament. I sup- 
pose we might say that in our country it is not onjy 
not represented in Congress, but positively excluded 
and disfranchised. Here, however, politics is really 
fashionable. 

The differences of home structure explain this diver- 
gency again. There is a great deal of loose talk about 
the duty of American gentlemen going into politics, 
and the example of English gentlemen devoting their 
lives and energies to political work is held up as a 
conclusive argument. Of course, they should, as a duty, 
but there is no incentive outside of that. There is no 
analogy at all between the two cases. The English gen- 
tleman goes into politics because he has his class inter- 
ests at stake and must defend them. His lands depend 
on the stability of the present laws, and he must sup- 
port them. He is "holding the fort" of his position. 

Moreover, he has a distinct representation in Parlia- 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 125 

ment, — his position, his class, his education, liis prop- 
erty, — while with us nothing is represented but the 
individual, — his existence as a unit of population. 
Under the English system not only has "the indi- 
vidual" a certain representation, but also all that he 
has been able to add to himself of moral or intellectual 
worth, or even material wealth. The American gen- 
tleman in politics, on the contrary, has only the same 
quality and force as the American blackguard, — one 
vote. The American scholar in politics has only the 
same quality and force as the American hoodlum — one 
vote. The American millionaire in politics has only 
the same quality and force as the American communist 
— one vote. 

The bottom reason why the American gentleman, 
the American scholar, the American property-holder, 
do not go into politics, and are so infrequently seen in 
Washington, is because education, cultivation, and prop- 
erty as such are not represented in our suffrage system, 
and there is no constituency, therefore, to send these 
men. We represent only the " individual," and, con- 
sequently, as a rule, " individuals" go into politics, and 
"individuals" are sent to Washington. 

The dress-coats, I may mention in concluding, are 
this year mainly on the Government side, although the 
Marquis of Hartington, the leader of the Opposition, 
frequently addresses the House in full dinner-costume. 
Still, Liberalism in some way seems to tend strongly to 
sack-coats and felt hats and ready-made clothing. 

LoNDOisr. 



11* 



126 ENGLISH POLITICS. 



CHAPTER XV. 

PARLIAMENT (CONTINUED). 

House of Commons — The Cries oe Parliame:n-t — The School- 
boy IN Parliament — Pair Play — Individual Independ- 
ence — Etiquette of the Floor — The Speaker of the 
House — " Politician" or " Statesman" — Dignity of the 
House— Decline of Oratory — Speaking in the House 
OF Commons— Cicero on the Treasury Bench — The 
Agent. 

I HAVE mentioned the school-boy atmosphere which 
often marks the House of Commons. 

English life, or at least the life of the upper, and so 
far controlling, classes, begins at the public schools — of 
which Eton and Rugby are examples familiar to us — 
and receives there an impress which never leaves it. 
Looking over the floor of either House of Parliament, 
you can see there the Eton boy and the university man 
all the time. They are the foundation of English pub- 
lic life, not merely intellectual, but moraL 

There is no more forcible illustration of the surviving 
force of this boy-education than the cries of Parliament, 
which sound so strangely to a foreigner, but which he 
soon sees are a real part of the process of legislation, 
just as regular and just as effective as the speech- 
making. Sometimes I thought them more so. These 
cries, so unusual to our ears, are a kind of low inter- 
mittent chorus Avith which the house at times accompa- 
nies the speaker, each political section, '^ right'' and 
" left,'^ " right above the gangway," "left above the 
gangway," etc., bearing its part. Unlike the Greek 
chorus, this accompaniment is not used to explain the 
plot of the speaker, but it does serve admirably to ex- 
plain the effect of the speech on the audience and on 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 127 

each part of it. Usually, of course, these cries are 
confiued to staccato explosions of dissent or approba- 
tion at the ends of sentences or at the point of some 
startling facts or figures. Sometimes, however, a 
speaker is accompanied from beginning to end with a 
kind of monotonous chant, rising, swelling, or sinking 
from time to time and sung in two or more parts. Mr. 
Edward Jenkins, who is especially distasteful to the 
Conservativeis, generally speaks to music of this kind. 

These cries are exactly such as might be heard from 
a school-room of boys anxious to put down a speaker, 
who by a natural reaction is supported in his turn by 
his friends, who come up to his aid with an opposing 
volume of sounds. Singularly enough, these sounds 
are often — generally, I think — given more or less fur- 
tively. You see before you a body of dignified, rather 
elderly gentlemen ; you know them to be perhaps the 
strongest legislative body in the world ; you see among 
them some of tlie greatest thinkers, writers, and states- 
men of the time ; you recognize some of England's no- 
blemen of high rank ; some gallant officers of her army, 
perhaps an admiral, too, or distinguished author ; sud- 
denly you hear a low, rising swell of sound that carries 
you back to your callow days of spelling-books and pop- 
corn and mint-stick candy, — 0-o-o-o-o-h ; Ou-oo-oo-oo ; 
Ah-a-a-a ; Whoo-whoo-wh ; Eeh-eeh-eeh-eh ; Boo- 
00-00 ; Err-r-r-r; Oh-ah-ooh-bah ; Umm-m-m-m-m; 
Ay-ay-ay, — all the vowel-sounds of the alphabet with 
every conceivable intonation and form of expression. 
It is these old gentlemen assisting in the making of a 
law of England. 

Watching closer, you will see, perhaps, a nervous 
sexagenarian member sitting squarely up in his seat 
and looking straight into the eyes of the speaker wdtli a 
severely-dissenting frown. His stern, grave features 
never move, but from his open mouth your ears detect 
a steadily-flowing stream of guttural bass. Another 
one intones openly his chant of derision or dissent. 



128 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

You see hats go up before mouths, heads turned away, 
a legislator or two suspiciously close behind a column, 
and other venerable but franker old gentlemen in boy- 
ish abandon giving way openly to the jollities of the 
hour. Then up from the other side comes a couuter- 
wave, bearing on its swell the sense of injury and a 
protest, — indignation and the determination to stand by 
its spokesman ; and so this battle, which is not on 
" the order of the day,'^ and which is not recorded in 
the next morning's papers, wages from night to night. 

Some members, by practice and experience, perhaps 
by constitutional adaptation or perhaps from having 
worked hai'd at school, attain great proficiency and 
ability in this mode of parliamentary tactics. One 
evening two portly old legislators with broad, cheery 
faces, white whiskers, and generally a fine, responsible, 
conservative air, who sat for the moment on the bench 
just in front of mine, opened fire at the same time, 
•evidently by preconcert. Not a feature moved ; their 
lips were just apart and apparently in rest; the bland, 
kindly expression of countenance never changed, but 
from these stout, smooth-shaven throats a strong volume 
of derisive sound flowed steadily and in smooth cur- 
rent, without a waver or break, for at least some min- 
utes, a chorus sufficient to disconcert a pretty self-reliant 
speaker, the more so from its being so well masked 
and conveying a mysterious opposition. 

The custom has some practical uses. Although the 
sounds are mostly simple vowel-notes, you soon learn 
to understand their meaning, and are able to mark the 
immediate effect of a speech in all parts of the house. 
It is, in fact, an almost instantaneous and continuous 
vote, enabling the speaker and his friends or foes to 
follow the effect of his argument from moment to mo- 
ment. Where there is a political topography of the 
floor, and the House sits in party platoons, as it does 
here, the feeling and condition of the body at any given 
moment are very clearly traceable in this way. 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 129 

While these school-room cries are rather a boyish 
kind of warfare, they are generally used with a boy's 
sense of candor, fair dealing, and fair play. They seem 
to be largely the spontaneous utterance of individual 
opinion, and not a mere partisan game, directed and 
organized. The cry '^Oh!'^ is the general note used 
to express derision, disapprobation, and opposition ; 
" Hear V^ to express support, sympathy, or to call es- 
pecial attention to any fact or opinion. " Hear !'^ might 
be called a kind of emphasis underlining contributed 
by the audience. It is also used ironically at times. 
The several cries frequently greeted a speaker from all 
sections of the house at one time, showing that they 
were individual and not mere responses. I have more 
than once seen a member while speaking applauded 
from the opposite side of the house, and I have also 
seen derisive cries on either side silenced by counter 
cries from the same side. 

This sense of fairness on the floor of Parliament, 
and aversion to partisan tactics, is a marked feature. 
The individual legislator has full freedom, and he is 
often allowed even to abuse it rather than that the right 
of free speech should suifer in his person. There is no 
" previous question" in the House in the sense of our 
rule, and I have heard members talk platitudes far into 
the morning and repeat each other wearily without re- 
buke or remonstrance, although the floor must have had 
its patience well worn out. Certainly the foreign visit- 
ors had. The chairman, too, allows the widest latitude 
in speaking to the question. This generous worship of 
fair play will be recognized as a well-known British 
school-boy trait. 

I never saw it violated in the House save on an oc- 
casion when Mr. Edward Jenkins arose to speak on the 
" flogging-in-the-army" debate. Then the entire Con- 
servative side — gray whiskers, bald-heads, dress-suits, 
army and navy officers, lords, statesmen, white hairs 
and all — set up a concerted symphony of disturbance 



130 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

entirely drowning his voice. Mr. Jenkins faced the in- 
decorous storm with great composure, speaking for four 
or five minuteS; — the usual length of the speeches then 
being made, — although he was entirely unheard from 
beginning to end, an occasional detached word, sentences 
apart, being the only sound intelligible. His compo- 
sure, as I afterwards learned, was perhaps like that of 
the eels which got used to be skinned, as he for some 
time past has always spoken under such circumstances. 
This gentleman, better known in the United States as 
" Ginx's Baby," has made himself especially obnoxious 
to the Conservatives, who allege that his assaults on the 
Government and its officials have been ungentlemanly 
and offensive, and placed him outside of the pale of gen- 
tlemen. Mr. Jenkins's friends, on the other hand, claim 
that all his movements have been legitimate and neces- 
sary ; that some of the abuses of English administrgf- 
tion are so involved with vested interests and hereditary 
claims that it is impossible to attack them without seem- 
ing to become personal. The question is therefore a 
debatable one inside of the House, and this treatment of 
Mr. Jenkins to an American view appears indefensible 
and hardly worthy of a great party. It is, in a sense, 
however, a strong tribute to Mr. Jenkins's power, as it 
proves that he has struck a blow or blows somewhere 
where they have hurt. 

The sibilant " hiss" of popular assemblies is, I be- 
lieve, used very little or not at all in Parliament. I do 
not recall hearing it. 

In addition to this admonitory refrain of dissent or 
assent, members are constantly subjected to another 
species of boyish training by " calls." Does a speaker 
indulge in some loose assertion, some wild generalization 
or inexact statement of fact, he is immediately reined 
up with sharp calls of "Date?" "Date?" "]N"ame?" 
" Name ?" " When ?" " Where ?" " Time ?" " Place ?" 
"Year?" "Day?" or positive cries of "No!" "No!" 



PARLIAMENT : THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 131 

if any one wishes to personally traverse his allegations. 
The educational influence of this usage is very great 
and very valuable. Careless declamation, vague rhet- 
oric, cowardly innuendo, rapidly shrink under this treat- 
ment. There is little speaking for effect in the House 
of Commons : a man must speak to the facts. There 
is no chance, either, under this rule of indulging in the 
unmanly habit of making loose and sweeping charges 
in the expectation that they will go to the country un- 
answered and do their work before an answer can come. 
Nor is it possible, under this regimen, to make foolish 
speeches and vainglorious threats to be read at home by 
your constituency, safe in the sure knowledge that none 
of your fellow-members will be silly enough to notice 
them. In short, in these res|)ects the floor of the House 
of Commons is very much like a ring in a boys' school- 
ground. Any boy may fight in it, but he must strike 
fair. 

It need hardly be added that these habits conduce to 
the habitual display of great personal independence on 
the part of the members. The personal independence 
of the English politician, his ready assertion of his in- 
dividuality, is a marked fact which soon strikes the 
political observer from America accustomed to the 
ready subserviency and machine drill of our own men 
of this class. The English political leader starts, as a 
rule, with social position, education, and an inherited in- 
come. He is not dependent on his political exertions, 
therefore, either for his standing in his community or 
for his means of livelihood, and has, besides, social and 
intellectual resources within himself which preclude the 
need of his seeking occupation or mental activity in 
politics. Fortunate thus in his triple armor, he need 
never sacrifice his individual opinions or his self-respect 
under the coercion of circumstances. So far, happily 
for England, the professional politician — the man who 
makes his living by politics — has not ap})eared, but I 
fear, with the social transition in progress, he is coming. 



132 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

There are, of course, men who will cringe and crawl 
under any circumstances, and England has her share 
of them, but as a class her public men are inde- 
pendent and courageous in the expression of individual 
opinion to an extent which contrasts most happily with 
the sad reverse in our own country. They are so by 
reason of their education and assured social position. 
I heard the Marquis of Hartington, the Liberal leader, 
one night in the House, and from the leaders' bench, 
make a speech disclaiming and rebuking the action of 
a section of his party which I feel sure no leader in our 
House would dare to make. And it created no especial 
surprise or commotion here. It seemed to be expected 
that Lord Hartington would do it, — that he owed it to 
himself. He owed it as a leader. With us, unfortu- 
nately, the leadership of a party too often consists in the 
collective sense of .the average and commonplace ma- 
jority of its membership. 

There is much about the landed system of Great 
Britain — the " great-families'^ system, based on primo- 
geniture and entail — which a republican cannot but 
consider bad for the state and for the human indi- 
vidual, but this great tribute must be paid to it, — that 
it does secure independent and educated politicians for 
the administration of the affairs of state. The syco- 
phancy of England so far is social rather than political, 
and as such comparatively harmless to the state. 

In fact, the very use of words shows the difference 
in the moral grade of the two countries on this point. 
'^ Politician,'' a depreciated word with us, is here an 
honorable one. It means here about wdiat ^^ statesman" 
means with us in the popular acceptation and use, — i.e., 
one who administers public affairs as a trust. Uncon- 
sciously, with us politician has come to mean one who 
is working for his own personal ends, and we seek in 
the word statesman to express some higher conception. 
People may not consciously acknowledge this, but I 
believe any fair man will admit that when it is ordi- 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 133 

narily said of any one in our land, "X is going into 
politics/^ it means that "X'^ is beginning to look for 
personal political employment. Politics means work- 
ing for office. Statesmanship means government or 
the administration of the public interests. Now, the 
English popular mind does not so degrade its political 
men as yet. Politics means, in popular acceptation, 
the administration of the affiiirs of state, and politicians 
the men who administer them. 

In fact, the popular sense of propriety does not 
admit that a politician — a member of the House, for 
instance — should busy himself about his election. The 
machinery of election, the science of elections, are 
something below the legislator, and which he must not 
touch. I do not mean to say that many members of 
Parliament do not busy themselves most earnestly 
about their elections and watch with most efficient care 
the whole process, but they must do it within-doors, 
with carefully-concealed hand, and not ostentatiously 
and so as to offend the conventional and traditional 
feeling of their constituency in this matter. Votes, 
voting, and the active direction of the canvass must 
be left to ^' the agent.'' 

While the beggarly seating of the House of Com- 
mons, its bovish cries, and the wearins; of hats by the 
members give an undignified and almost indecorous 
air to its exterior, it is at bottom a most dignified and 
substantial body. The sense of the House of its own 
dignity is something far surpassing anything of the 
kind known in our Cono^ress. It is an historic evolu- 
tion. The House of Commons represents, and means, 
and is, " the people of England.'' It never forgets that. 
Every privilege it has has been wrested from reluctant 
power. They have come at long intervals, — generations 
apart. Many of them have been paid for with blood, 
offered on the scaffold and shed in battle. Many of 
them have cost life and property, long years of merci- 

12 



134 ENGLISH POLTTICS. 

less imprisonment, and cruel confiscation. No wonder 
that this treasure, this trust for the nation, is so sacredly 
and jealously guarded. Every oifence against the 
dignity of the House from without or within is an 
assault on the liberties of En2;land. Hence the ex- 
treme sensitiveness of the Englishman to the rights of 
the House, and the honest feeling that an attempt to 
coerce or bribe a member is the highest kind of treason 
to the people. For instance, this month a citizen, a 
lawyer-lobbyist, was committed to the tower of West- 
minster by Parliament for merely saying that he could 
influence a parliamentary committee. It was generally 
admitted that he did not believe that he could do so, 
and that he lied to his client when he said so, but Par- 
liament considered its honor involved by such a state- 
ment even from a comparatively irresponsible man, 
and he went to prison by a unanimous vote of the 
House, the leaders of both parties vying with one 
another to punish the impertinent falsehood. I was 
present when the motion for commitment was made. 
The facts having been established by a report of a 
select committee, there was no debate at all, the 
House seeming to disdain to soil its hands with such a 
discussion, and the whole affair was a matter of only a 
few moments. 

In previous letters I noted several traditional usages 
and observances which illustrate how zealously, even 
in petty things, the House guards its dignity and 
privileges. 

There are also some habits and traditional formulae 
of speech which, although seemingly of small moment 
in themselves, act as efficient mechanical aids in pre- 
serving the dignity of official or political intercourse. 
Names are never used. One member always speaks 
of another as "the honorable gentleman and member 

from ." This is inexorable, and is only the first 

step. All members are " honorable gentlemen,'^ and 
must be addressed as such. If they are or have been 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 135 

in the Ministry, they must be addressed as " the right 
honorable gentlemen." If a member is also a lawyer, 
he must be addressed as " the honorable and learned 
gentleman." If he has served in the army or navy, he 
is addressed as " the honorable and gallant gentleman." 
If he is, further, a peer, he is to be addressed as " the 
honorable gentleman" or " right honorable gentleman 
and noble lord," or " most noble lord" if his rank is 
high enough. A member may readily be a " right 
honorable and gallant gentleman and noble lord," and, 
if he is, must be so addressed every time he is spoken 
to or of on the floor. 

This usage, although a mechanical form, acts as an 
effectual barrier to indecorous or impertinent familiarity 
or to bad manners, which may be unintentional, the 
unfortunate heritage of early vulgarity. It would be 
impossible, for instance, under this rule for one states- 
man to speak of another as Johnny Sherman, or Andy 
Johnson, or Abe Lincoln, or Tom Corwin, or Zach 
Chandler. The habits of good society thus acquired 
in the House, if not attained before, are carried on to 
the stump, — or hustings, as they say here, — where the 
language of the speakers is, with rare exceptions, that 
of gentlemen. 

Every idea in England must have a personal em- 
bodiment or conception. She is much nearer the '4dol" 
stage of thought than we. She believes in a personal 
sovereign as necessary to localize and animate the na- 
tional sense of loyalty. This sovereign, too, must have 
a golden crown and a sceptre like any monarch in 
Afghanistan or Persia or Zululand or the fifth cen- 
tury. She believes that her judges need robes and wigs 
to express the majesty of the law, invisible here, but 
which is so clearly visible in the pine-table court-rooms 
of the backwoods of Pennsylvania and Minnesota. 

So the power and dignity and authority of the House 
of Commons centre in the person of the Speaker. He 



136 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

sums up in his official presence centuries of history. 
And in this case there is a dramatic and historical pro- 
priety in the political nimbus which encircles his figure. 
He it was that for hundreds of years ^vas first arrested 
when the crown moved against the people of England. 
He it was who rotted in the dungeon and died on the 
scaffold. And he represents to-day a popular strength 
and is looked up to with a respect and kind of loyalty 
which in no way attaches to the office in our country. 

His authority inside the House is correspondingly 
respected. His slightest movement seemed to command 
attention and respect. The rude accessory of the ham- 
mer is entirely unneeded. I listened to one debate 
which Englishmen of long parliamentary experience 
seemed to think almost unprecedented in its heat and 
disorder, and one distinguished member frankly ex- 
pressed his mortification that I should witness the same 
and carry it away as an impression of the British 
Parliament. Feeling certainly ran high, although 
the language was always guarded and, compared with 
our legislative emeutes, moderate. The Irish members, 
however, were openly engaged in the work of " ob- 
struction," and, with their English friends aiding and 
abetting, the night was far spent, and the situation was 
unquestionably trying. The speaking was brief, but 
quick and spirited, and the floor always contested, half 
a dozen or more members often striving for it at once. 
In all this evening the Speaker's decisions — which were 
manifestly impartial and honest — were never contested, 
and when a surge of feeling or cries seemed about to 
overwhelm the room and sweep away everything, a 
simple wave of his hand without moving from his seat 
instantly calmed the. rising storm and restored tran- 
quillity and order. The noisy pounding of a hammer 
or the frantic ringing of a bell, as in Italy or France, 
would be resented in Westminster. 

The Speaker, Mr. Brand, it is fair to say, is, however, 
an exceptionably able man. He is a Liberal, and his 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 137 

discharge of liis office under the former administration 
Avas so acce})tabie and satisfactory that he was re-elected 
to his position by the new Conservative House, — by a 
unanimous vote, in fact, I think. This evidences a 
very marked contrast between politics in England and 
America. 

The salary of the Speaker of the House is £5000, 
about $25,000. The members receive no salary for 
their services, or compensation of any kind in money. 

There is no system of standing committees in the 
House, as with us, nor is there any call of the previous 
question, in the sense of our use of it. 

The most marked difference, however, by all odds 
between the legislatures of the two countries is in the 
style of speaking and general conduct of business, — the 
demonstrative "oration'^ on our side and the quiet, 
business-like statement of a few sentences here. It is 
commonly known, I suppose, that there is no such 
thing as " oratory^^ in Parliament, in either House. 
No member ever " makes a speech^' in the conventional 
sense of that phrase, as known with us. Some of the 
usages I have described are clearly incompatible with 
the traditional custom of forensic declamation or pomp- 
ous and pretentious argument, and are sufficient to ac- 
count for its absence. Many writers ascribe the death 
of oratory in the House to the uncomfortable benches 
and limited accommodations, — a clearly superficial and 
thoughtless view, as in the palmy oratorical days of 
Pitt and Burke the accommodations were no better, and 
most likely worse, especially in the auxiliary point of 
retiring-rooms, wash-rooms, closets, etc. 

The cause of the decline of forensic declamation is 
deeper and historical. The days of the Pitts and of 
Fox and of Burke are gone forever in England, be- 
cause she is too far advanced in thought and education. 
Impassioned oratory, I take it, is an ingredient of im- 
mature civilization and dies before a higher condition 



138 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

of general education. Demosthenes was possible only 
under the crude and simple conditions of Greek society. 
Cicero and the brilliant school of contemporary orators 
were the product of a slavocratic republic, where the 
mass of the people were unlearned and untaught. 
Chrysostom spoke to congregations of Christian con- 
verts densely ignorant and rude in their manners, as 
his own reproofs of them show. When Bossuet and 
Bourdeloue swayed all France with emotion and pas- 
sion, common France was in a state of mental and re- 
ligious tutelage. England, when she was proud of 
Pitt and Fox and Burke,, had a class of country gen- 
tlemen she will never be proud of as men of intelli- 
gence and intellectual calibre, whatever else may have 
been their merits. Even Clay and Webster represent 
a very crude and provisional stage of civilization in our 
own country, while Patrick Henry and the Revolution- 
ary orators were the outcome of our cradle-hours. The 
rule holds good in the United States even at this mo- 
ment. Wherever civilization is highest and scholarship 
compact and influential, there the pyrotechnic " orator'^ 
flickers out. The ^' mountain eagles'^ of our Alle- 
ghenies and Cordilleras, the ^' silver-tongued clarions'' 
who thrill courts and stump and legislatures on the 
prairies or in the Mississippi bottom, cut a sorry figure 
if ever they get before the Supreme Court of the United 
States or of any Eastern State. Oratory is, in fact, 
only a means of impressing simple or half-educated 
people which fails when the people get beyond that 
way of receiving impressions. The civilized world of 
to-day has pronounced against it. Bismarck declares 
parliamentary oratory to be " a mischief.'' England 
suppressed it a generation ago, and we are going in the 
same direction. 

The speaking in the House of Commons to-day is 
extremely severe and simple. Members usually speak 
only from three to five minutes even on the most im- 
portant subjects, and their language is studied in its 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 139 

simplicity and avoidance of rhetoric. Of course there 
are times when both the occasion and tlie matter de- 
mand elaborate and more lengthy treatment and a 
minister or member may sj^eak for an hour or hours, 
but this is very rare. The habitual mode is for mem- 
bers to rise only for a few moments, delivering them- 
selves straight to the point in a rather conversational 
style, but every word weighed, guarded, and carefully 
chosen, very much as an experienced merchant might 
speak in making a contract. The British legislator has 
a sense of personal responsibility for every worJ uttered 
on the floor which does not exist in our legislative 
bodies at all. In fact, the conduct of business in Par- 
liament resembles rather the consultation of responsible 
merchants in a countino^-room or the meetino^of a small 
board of railway directors than anything like our pop- 
ular conception of a legislative discussion. The usage 
of " interrogating the Ministry'' also leads directly both 
to brevity, a conversational style, and caution and preci- 
sion in the selection of words. 

The substance of parliamentary speech is generally 
substantial and good, and the scene w^ould be impressive 
and dignified were not the whole effect marred by a hesi- 
tation and labored awkwardness in speaking which, if it 
is not affectation, has all the appearance of it. But 
whether an affectation or an infirmity, it is a serious 
blemish. There is observable throuo^hout all the Eno^- 
lish higher classes a cultivated diffidence and tendency to 
self-depreciation, which is perhaps in the start a recoil 
from the self-assertion and pretension of the vulgar and 
new-made classes. It has been carried, however, to an 
extreme which verges on effeminacy, if it is not that 
already. This mannerism of halting and hawing is its 
development on the rostrum, and it effectually disposes 
of all forensic grace and a good deal of forensic effi- 
ciency. The far remove of the British Parliament 
from all the traditions of the forum is best illustrated 
by reporting one of Cicero's speeches as it would be 



X40 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

delivered from the treasury bench to-day : Quousque 
— ah — tandem — ah-a-abutere, — Catilina — hem-m-m — 
patieniia, n-nostraf Quamdiu nos etiam — haw-aw — 
furor — hem — haio — ah-h-h. Yet this is the exact way 
in which a British legislator grapples with a question of 
state, and to get the force of what he is saying you have 
to disabuse your mind absolutely of the vice and un- 
gracefulness of its delivery. 

Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the general impres- 
sion made by the House of Commons when compared 
with the leading legislative bodies of the world is good. 
Its dignity is well sustained, and there is a thorough and 
conscious power in the membership which inspires con- 
fidence. There is no attempt at producing effects or 
making a personal display, and the body keeps pretty 
steadily to the work in hand, although, for reasons 
already mentioned, it is not either skilful or successful 
in producing results. The work of legislation is fear- 
fully behind, by common admission. It is to the high 
credit of the membership, however, to be able to say 
when you look over the floor and listen to it you feel a 
sense of its integrity. You believe that the bulk of the 
body is honestly at work trying to make laws, — not 
talking to the distant county of Buncombe or manu- 
facturing issues and records for the next campaign. 

In fact, legislation — the administration of public 
affairs — here is one thing, the function of a gentleman, 
and getting elected is another thing, and public opinion 
so far jealously enforces their division. That is at least 
the traditional feeling, which as yet the politician dare 
not offend. He must not conduct his campaign per- 
sonally, but through an agent. 

Hence has arisen in English political life " the agent," 
— a distinctive cog-wheel in the political machine to 
which we have no direct equivalent. The agent is a 
kind of political attorney who has made votes and the 
science of voting a study. He has the records of many 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 141 

elections for many years. All elections here are very 
local, — in boroughs, counties, universities, or some re- 
stricted limits. The agent knows t*lie past history of 
all these votes and the characteristics of the sections. 
He can calculate political " probabilities'' and give 
estimates, and, having this fund of special knowledge 
and this special bent of mind, he is regularly employed 
by the candidates to control their campaign and is paid 
in money for this service. The nominee is presumed 
at least to be above this kind of work. Thus votes and 
voting are one thing here, and politics — i.e., statesman- 
ship — is another, and the man of votes cannot presume 
to be the politician. «' 

This distinction is severely maintained clear down 
to comparatively minute details. For instance, paid 
canvassers, clerks, managers, or watchers, under an act 
of 1867, are not allowed to be polled, and lose their 
votes by reason of the nature of their occupation. 

It is needed to be said, greatly to their credit, that 
the English laws in their provisions for guarding tlie 
integrity of the polls are veiy strict. Gratuitous re- 
freshments in all forms have long been forbidden. 
Charities distributed in a borough by a man who after- 
wards contested it have been held to be corruption. 
This rule, although its intent is honorable, might at 
times work great hardships both to the poor and to 
liberal gentlemen. 

Looking over the House of Commons, even a stranger 
can see clear evidence of great changes at work, for 
under the healthy law of the British Constitution the 
House must change with the changing social structure 
of the kingdom. And these changes follow our lead. 

London. 



142 ENGLISH POLITICS. 



CHAPTER Xyi. 

PARLIAMENT (CONTINUED). 
The House op Lords — A Historic Survival — The Throne 

OF ElSTGLAlSTD — SAILING OF THE " MAYFLOWER." 

The House of Lords has less interest for an Ameri- 
can than the Commons, for it is a lost form in the ma- 
chinery of government. Like our electoral colleges, 
the life has gone out of it, and only the shell remains; 
but it is a very handsome shell. The hall itself is a 
gorgeous flood of gold and color flushed with soft light 
and walled in with Gothic oak and stained-glass win- 
dows. Around the wall in solemn niches stand the 
statues of the bold barons of Runnymede. The stal- 
wart barons of England, however, have long since 
abandoned this floor. 

There is no special difficulty in seeing a session of 
the House of Lords, as the order of any peer will 
admit one, and not merely to a caged gallery, but to 
very good seats just in the rear of the floor and on a 
level with it. From here one can see all that is to be 
seen, which, in the way of parliamentary procedure, is 
not much, and what there is of it is dull and spiritless. 

As the American visitor walks through the peers' 
corridor on his way to that portion of Westminster 
Hall which contains the chamber of the House of 
Lords, he experiences for a moment the slight shock 
of a complimentary sensation in seeing as one of 
the eight great frescos of the walls "The Sailing of 
the Mayflower," a companion-piece to the interminable 
" Landing of the Pilgrims," which forever stares one 
in the face from bank-notes and legislative halls 
throughout all the confines of the United States. But 



PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 14,3 

it certainly makes one feel suddenly at home, and with 
even a pride of kinship in the place, to find the English 
end of the story told with such honor, and almost at 
the footsteps of the throne. An odd sight which strikes 
one passing through the lobby or vestibule to the floor, 
quite a small and cramped chamber, is a number of 
rows of common pegs, such as might be in the closet 
of a boys' scliool-room, but over each peg the name of 
a peer of England, — all the dukes and earls and barons. 
These pegs are crowded close together, and are for the 
hats and coats of the members, — a peg to a peer. The 
provision is not a whit better than that of many a com- 
mon school-house in our land to which barefoot boys 
come with ragged felts and perhaps no coat at all, but 
it is all there is for these lords, who drive up to the 
door with a brace of footmen, perhaps, and from a 
palace. The custom, however, has some historic sanc- 
tion, and they stick to it. It will probably last as long 
as the House of Lords. 

Inside of the main hall the seating and general ap- 
pearance of the interior are about tlie same as those of 
the House of Commons. At the head of the room, 
however, where the Speaker's desk would be in our 
Senate chamber, you see " the throne of England." 
You feel an absurd sense of suffering a disilkision when 
you see only a chair, — a very profound achievement 
of upholstery, no doubt, but still a chair. The Ameri- 
can republican knows in his heart that a tlirone must 
be a chair; still, as it is associated in his mind with fairy 
tales and myths and all the wonders of childhood, it 
has grown into something grand and stately and im- 
pressive, and he suffers a pang to find it only a j^iece 
of furniture replaceable from any cabinet-shop. The 
throne is one of those things which, on the whole, it is 
best not to see. When it is resolved into a common- 
place chair there is a shattering of faith as sad as when 
the beanpole of Jack the Giant-Killer vanishes into 
the thin cold air of experience and science. In front of 



144 ' ENGLISH POLITICS. 

the tlirone some little distance, and at its foot, is the cele- 
brated "woolsack/^ It is a capacious, heavily-cushioned 
footstool. On this sits the Lord Chancellor of England, 
who presides over the sessions of the House of Lords. 

By the taw and theory of the English government, 
the House of Lords is something more than a co-ordi- 
nate body of the national legislature, like our Senate. 
It has an absolute veto on all legislation by the House 
of Commons. Not only is this power utterly unused, 
but it has ceased even to deter. It will never be 
claimed. Politically, the House of Lords has ceased 
to exist, its functions in the government having passed 
to the Cabinet, or Ministry, which is practically' the 
Upper House. Even the family influence of the peers, 
to yield political results in this day, must be wielded 
through the House of Commons. 

As a historical picture, however, the House of Lords 
still survives in good condition. A nominal number 
of peers attend its daily sessions during Parliament 
season, and mechanically pass all th^ bills and go 
through all the forms of legislation. On state occa- 
sions this venerable relic solemnly "" summons'^ the lower 
House into its presence, and the House comes. The 
crimsoned hall, too, serves as a splendid stage, where 
the queen occasionally gives a grand spectacular political 
tableau somethino; like one of the fforareous relit>;ious func- 
tions you see at intervals in the great churches of Rome. 

It is worth while dropping in on the House of Lords 
as often as possible just to study the personnel of the 
body, and see that type of man which a privileged 
class, carefully tended for centuries, and draining the 
blood and soil of the land, — its education and culture 
and power and wealth,— evolves. That is about all, 
although it is a good deal. You will see nothing of 
debate or action in it, learn nothing of politics. The 
House of Lords in our day is an interesting social 
study, -but it has ceased to be a political one, save as an 
antique or remain. 



FOREIGN SERVICE. 145 

CHAPTER XVII. 

FOEEIGN SERVICE. 

The Old Ambassador and the New — A Newspaper Pleni- 
potentiary — The Old-World Ambassador without Uses 
IN THE Political Machinery of the New — Educational 
Functions op the Service — How Best to Conserve it — 

KOTATION on the DIPLOMATIC LiST — TENDENCY OF THE EU- 
ROPEAN Life to De-Americanizk the Kepublican Citi- 
zen. 

It is one of the anomalies of the present transition 
state of society from old ideas and usages to newer ones 
that, while our government sends fifteen ministers to 
Europe at salaries of from $7500 to $17,500, to repre- 
sent us and, speak for us, the incessant, effective repre- 
sentation is done by a modest journalist in Philadelphia, 
Mr. Joel Cook, the American correspondent of the Lon- 
don Times, whose voice is heard every day, not only in 
one but in all the courts of Europe, and not only by 
the official governments, but by the people. He is by 
far the most omnipresent and influential envoy extraor- 
dinary that has ever gone from this country. 

While the London Times has not the circulation of 
many of the papers of Europe, it has a weight and in- 
fluence which none of them have. It is taken by every 
foreign minister of all countries, and in all countries its 
dispatches are accredited as authority. They are quoted 
in Parliament and at the dinner-tables and official desks 
of ambassadors. What Europe at this time from day 
to day thinks of America and the American people is 
decided, not by the communications of our diplomatic 
force, but by what says the London Times. 

There is a grave and growing doubt in the public 

mind whether our foreign or diplomatic service is worth 

its cost to the republic since the introduction of ocean 
Q k 13 



146 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

cables and newspaper correspondence and the absolute 
adoption of the Monroe doctrine as an article of popular 
political faith. A look over the ground I think justi- 
fies the conclusion that it has little meaning at all for 
us any more in the old sense^ but that possibly it can 
still be put to better and higher uses than it has ever 
served, and that without change of form. It is better 
perhaps for the present to let the shell of the old insti- 
tution remain, but to gradually give to the service itself 
a new character and function. 

^^ The ambassador'^ is the survival of a European 
condition of society which never was transferred here. 
His functions belong to a machinery of government 
which never was put in motion on this continent. His 
work, in the natural revolution of our new social growth, 
has been taken up and is discharged on a larger scale by 
a new personage, — the special correspondent. 

Prince Metternich, in his gossippy memories of Old- 
World and old-fashioned diplomacy, just given to print 
by his son, relates that he once asked a brother ambas- 
sador " how he contrived to have a letter to send to 
London every post day." There were two a week. 

" You will see no difficulty in it when I tell you my 
secret. If anything comes to my knowledge that may 
interest my government, I tell it; if not, I invent my 
news, and contradict it by the next courier." 

Now, that is exactly the trick of ih^ lazy or unrelia- 
ble newspaper correspondent of our time ; but it illus- 
trates forcibly how exactly one of the functions of the 
old ambassador has devolved upon the new international 
envoy. The ambassador reported to his government 
all that he could of the social and political movements 
in foreign countries ; the correspondent reports exactly 
the same, only a thousand times more fully, to the 
people, which is our government. 

The Old- World ambassador had three grand functions 
which were the meaning of his office and the reason of 
his being : 



FOREIGN SERVICE. 147 

J[. To represent in his person the relations, whatever 
they were, which existed between his own Government 
and the Government to which lie was sent. 

II. At times to act for his Government on his own 
responsibility according to his best judgment. 

III. To keep his Government constantly advised of 
all the news. 

For the American situation the Monroe doctrine has 
done away with the first of these functions, the tele- 
graph with the second, and the newspaper with the 
third. 

We have no foreign relations in the sense of Euro- 
pean diplomacy with any power in Europe. When it 
is necessary for a minister to act now, he receives spe- 
cific instructions by telegraph. He can even cable a 
conversation. The diplomatic reports are always far 
behind the public information of wire and type. 

As a matter of fact, our entire diplomatic list could 
be swept away with entire safety. Our only real rela- 
tions with foreign countries are commercial ones, and 
these are handled by the consular department. As far 
as my judgment goes, however, I would not advise its 
abolition, but strongly urge its retention for the present 
on broader grounds of national utility. There is no 
more broadening education than the comparative study 
of foreign nations, their governments, social structure, 
and systems of thought and religion, and there is no 
education more needful at present to our own national 
wants. 

The diplomatic service affords an admirable school 
for this. It may be made, in fact, a national free college 
for this kind of education, and its uses in this way are 
twofold. It serves to educate personally the men whom 
we specially select for this elevated tuition, and, if their 
selection is judicious, they in turn become teachers of 
the whole people. A James Russell Lowell in Eng- 
land, a Motley or Bancroft or Bayard Taylor or an 



148 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

Andrew White at Berlin, a George P. Marsh at Rome, 
do something more than answer all onr meagre official 
uses, or than even to train and strengthen themselves. 
They serve to translate and send over something of 
England and Germany and all Europe to us, and Bret 
Harte and Eugene Schuyler, at their consular desks, are 
worth a good deal more to the American people and 
literature than all their possible service as registrars of 
shipping entries. Nathaniel Hawthorne, consul to Liv- 
erpool, is doing good service to the whole nation yet, 
although the Government and the men that sent him 
are long ago gone with him into the grave. It is by 
the adoption of this principle of appointment — the se- 
lection for diplomatic posts of men of high character 
and of scholarly rather than of an average politician's 
abilities — that we can best conserve our diplomatic de- 
partment under an altering condition of things, and 
obtain its fullest and highest uses for the whole nation. 

At all events, as it stands at present, our diplomatic 
service is thoroughly illogical and unsatisfactory, and 
no change or experiment even could much impair its 
illusory efficiency. 

The salaries of the several embassies are extremely 
inadequate to do what they are supposed to do, and it 
is impossible for the ministers living on them to repre- 
sent our country as other countries are represented. 
If it is the idea of the government to perpetuate the 
old-fashioned systena of diplomatic representation and 
communication, then funds should be supplied our rep- 
resentatives to act their part decently, according to the 
requirements of the old-fashioned code. 

Again, according to the established law of diplo- 
matic usage and etiquette settled long before we came 
^on the stage, an ambassador is one who represents the 
person of a sovereign ruler and always outranks a 
minister plenipotentiary, who only represents the gov- 
ernment of a country. Now, we know nothing at all 
of the doctrine of the sanctity or superiority of the 



FOREIGN SERVICE. 149 

person of a sovereign, and, when it is explained to us, 
look on it only as either political heresy or silliness ; but 
we are forced all the time to impliedly admit it in our 
diplomatic relations. At any court of Europe in any 
question of rank or precedence, any ambassador repre- 
senting a toy king (of Greece, for instance) or a bur- 
lesque emperor (of Hayti, for instance) will always take 
the lead of the republican representative of fifty mil- 
lions of American citizens. No American minister, 
no matter what his years or influence or seniority of 
service, can ever be the dean of the diplomatic college 
at any capital where there is an ambassador present. 
This is the very case now at one of the prominent 
courts of Europe. 

But there is another and more serious consequence 
resulting from this fundamental diplomatic law. An 
ambassador as representing the person of his sovereign 
may always demand and have a personal interview with 
the sovereign of the country to which he is accredited. 
A minister plenipotentiary may deal only through the 
ministry. In a crisis the foreign sovereign of his own 
pleasure may grant him an interview, but the minister 
cannot demand it as a right. We are therefore in this 
false position, that should our relations with any Eu- 
ropean court at any time become critical, our minister 
at that very court would not have equal facilities for 
action with the ambassadors of other powers. For 
instance, the empire of Russia is an autocratic govern- 
ment. The pleasure of the Emperor is supreme, and 
his word is law. Should this imperial person meditate 
a huge war involving the interests of every first-rate 
power on the earth, the ambassadors from England and 
Germany could see him and talk with him at their 
will ; but the minister plenipotentiary of the United 
States at St. Petersburg could not, — not even if the 
threatened war was with ourselves. Could any position 
be more false than this, and what is the propriety of 
recognizing a system which forces us to accept it ? 

13* 



150 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

Lastly, the men whom we do send on this important 
service, which may be made more important every 
year, should be real Americans, fresh from the soil, and 
not those who have lived long enough abroad to have 
de-Americanized themselves. The European life in- 
evitably tends to lessen one's respect for the human 
person and to weaken one's trust and hope in the people. 
This moral change is sure to come, and it conies so 
slowly and insensibly that the victims are not aware of 
their own transmutation. It must needs be when the 
vast mass of the people are looked down upon, are 
classified to the bottom, are used, when perhaps they 
have lost respect for themselves, that one comes to feel 
unconsciously contempt for them, and that manhood 
fails to command the respect which is given to class and 
privilege. Yet an instinctive reverence for humanity, 
no matter what its mask, and faith in the people are two 
of the foundation-pillars of the republic, and he who has 
lost them does not any more represent the American 
people. 

There is a sound, healthy democratic principle at 
bottom in the usage of rotation in office on foreign ser- 
vice. Jefferson held, I think, that no man could rep- 
resent us abroad with usefulness longer than eight years, 
and he was about right, although no fixed term can be 
intelligently laid down, for men are not alike. Some 
men travel in Europe only during a long residence of 
years. Others begin to live there from the moment of 
their landing on its shores. 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. 151 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

COMPARATIVE POLITICS. 

Contrast between the Politics of England and of the 
United States — The Comparative Magnitude and Ke- 
sponsibilities of Administration — Evolution of the 
European Statesman — The Educated Forces of Euro- 
pean Politics — The Intellectual Kequirements of Gov- 
ernment Abroad — The English Statesmen. 

There is nothing iu all Europe that challenges one's 
profounder respect than the strength of her statesmen, 
and nothing that is more of a revelation to a New- World 
stranger than the gravity and intellectual range of 
lier politics. Government abroad is a science, here it 
"runs itself;" and there could be nothing better calcu- 
lated to repress the "spread eagle" of the average citizen 
than an honest attempt to master the political system 
of one of these " eifete monarchies," and to gain some 
definite conception of its ])ractical workings. The 
problem of government in Europe is so vexed, the 
dangers so imminent, so fixed and hereditary, the rela- 
tions with all neighboring powers so involved and en- 
tangling, the internal interests so conflicting, the people 
so poor and discontented and burdened, that our own 
troubles and questions of state seem poor and childish 
in comparison. 

Studying the range and demands of European states- 
manship, one sees readily how it has produced the edu- 
cated statesman, so unfamiliar to us, and why the con- 
duct of government abroad calls for a breadth of 
scholarship and a trained intellectual force that have not 
yet been a necessity in the United States. The " log 
cabin" and " mill-boy" and " horny-handed" statesmen 



152 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

of our prairie reputation would wreck any European 
ship of state irretrievably in three months, perhaps in 
twenty-four hours. In viewing the field of foreign 
governments one sees a new wisdom and safety in tlie 
Monroe doctrine. Perhaps its framers foresaw even in 
their early hour that our crude political leaders would 
never be able to meet in equal combat the intellectual 
giants of the Old World. 

To illustrate more clearly the disparity between the 
magnitude of the burden of European government and 
the simplicity of ours, I propose to etch a running par- 
allel between the political systems of Great Britain and 
of our country, — in the briefest outline, of course ; but 
it will serve to suggest the wide difference between the 
requirements of statesmanship in the two nations. I 
select England because the similarity of her institutions 
admits best of direct comparison, but nearly every Euro- 
pean government faces all the troubles and dangers and 
responsibilities of England ; some have them intensi- 
fied ; and some have special problems of their own. 

I. Perhaps the initial and commonest form of national 
self-glorification with us is the boast of our space of ter- 
ritory, — the eagle that rests on Pocky Mountain Cordil- 
leras and laves his wings in the Atlantic and Pa- 
cific. Now, extent of territory is in itself not necessarily 
either a danger or a source of power, although it may be 
both. Judea and Greece have been the mightiest forces 
of known civilization, and the Poman empire managed 
to govern the whole world without steamships, railways, 
or telegraphs. But, as far as magnitude of dominion 
tests statesmanship or is evidence of national power, we 
with one segment of a continent do not begin to approach 
Great Britain. The British rule to-day extends over 
one-third of the surface of the globe, and over one-fourth 
of its population. We are but a modest principality in 
comparison. 

Again, the territory of the British empire is not 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. I53 

compact and contiguous as is ours (with the inconsid- 
erable exception of Alaska), but lies in every quarter 
of the globe, separated by seas and contineuts, and on 
it dwell people of every race and of nearly every lan- 
guage, speaking in different tongues, thinking by dif- 
ferent modes, inheriting diverse systems of thought and 
religion and political tradition. We are one people. 

II. In England the structure of society is a rigid 
stratification of classes ; in the United States there is 
but one homogeneous class. The people of our country 
are one mass of molecular atoms, each atom politically 
alike. The English legislator legislates for many 
classes, each with defined limits and vested rights fixed 
by law and sanctified by inheritance. These rights and 
the interests of the several classes from time to time jar 
and clash. He must legislate for many kingdoms in one. 
The American legislator, on the other hand, simply 
passes one law for all, because all are equal before the 
law and in the eye of the law. By virtue also of this 
homogeneousness of the people, political ideas travel 
rapidly and equally, permeating a common mass. In 
England they cannot, by reason of the sectional and 
class barriers. A given view of politics or of some 
special question of policy may be accepted and adopted 
by some one class long before it reaches another, or it 
may linger long in some certain locality for historical 
reasons. The Scotchman and the Welshman and the 
Irishman do not fuse mentally with the Englishman, 
do not think according to the same modes of thought. 
Even the Yorkshire man and Lancashire man stand 
apart, and the man of Surrey or Devon from him of 
Northumberland. Nor, for that matter, do the farmers 
with the gentry, or the clergy with the laborer, or the 
professional man with the peerage, or any of these 
classes with the others. The body politic has neither 
the constant internal circulation nor the uniform molec- 
ular composition of ours. Everything in England 
is fixed to the soil in small local centres by fastenings 



154 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

of society and of blood, and there is not that mobility 
in the community at large by virtue of which, with us, 
a national idea travels rapidly and uniformly over the 
whole nation. Each county has diiferent customs, 
usages, and habits of thought which differentiate it from 
the rest of the nation as a whole and in all its social 
strata. The great family estates, covering compact 
territories, transmit family peculiarities of living, of 
thinking, even of farming and working, and operate 
as a barrier to national impulses of thought. In our 
country a wave of thought moves rapidly and evenly 
over all the land and through all the people. Tlie 
whole country feels it at once. Witness not only the 
passage of political emotions over the national mind, 
the rapid transit of a new party issue, or of the thoughts 
of a great speech, but of social or mental sensation, as 
in the sweep of the praying-band or spelling-bee excite- 
ment from one ocean to the other. In England it is 
not so. Men do not travel, ideas do not travel. It is 
but thirteen hours from London to Edinburgh, but it 
takes more than thirteen years for a political idea to 
traverse the route. 

III. Our government is a simple republic, a federa- 
tion of a body of equal and co-ordinate States, each 
State peopled by a population of the same race, the 
same language, the same history. All the States have 
the same rights, powers, and obligations, and all these 
are defined. The administration of the government, 
even, is by a written chart. Everything is laid down 
on paper. 

Compare with this simplicity the tremendous impe- 
rial system of Great Britain, — a system that has an 
illustration only in Rome under the Caesars. A little 
class of great families dominate, first, their own order 
and through it England, and, controlling social Eng- 
land, elect their own Parliament. Through this Parlia- 
ment they govern allied kingdoms and an empire 
stretching through Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. I55 

Australasia, and the islands of the sea. The imperial 
standard of this great dominion floats over colonial na- 
tions of all races, spanning even the great gulf between 
the Aryan and Semitic bloods ; over people of every re- 
ligion and creed, the regnant faith of Christianity being 
in the minority; overall latitudes, all colors, all lan- 
guages, all traditions, all forms of government. The 
British empire of to-day, morally and physically, is 
grander than ever were those of Greece or Rome, and 
its rule is far more conscientious and beneficent. And 
these principalities and powers and provinces and dis- 
tant kingdoms of the seas the imperial Parliament 
governs, not on one simple and uniform plan, but by 
ever diverse and varying machineries, — by legislatures, 
by armies, by imperial decrees, by proconsuls, by mili- 
tary governors, by civil governors, by unpretentious 
'Apolitical agents,'^ or by regal viceroys. The name is 
nothing, the power is always there. The heart of this 
marvellous body politic throbs at Westminster, whence 
its currents of blood are impelled to the uttermost ends 
of the earth. The brain is the premier of England. 
Contrast this with our ready-made work at Washington. 
IV. Our provincial statesmen groan under what they 
call the burden of national patronage. When they 
affect liberal political culture, they tell us that the un- 
paralleled magnitude of this patronage is a grave danger 
to the republic. When they simply claim to be strong 
politicians, ^' leaders,^^ they struggle and wrestle and 
raise mighty tempests about the distribution of a few 
petty clerkships and evanescent post-offices. The whole 
government patronage of the United States is but as a 
flea-bite to that of England. Whatever we have Eng- 
land has on a grander scale. What are our petty post- 
offices, with New York at $8000 salary and Philadelphia 
at $4000 heading the list, to the limitless range of public 
offices necessary to administer the vast and imposing 
imperial machine? Consider the endless civil-service 
list; the post-offices; the telegraph-service, which, in 



156 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

Great Britain, is governmental; the army and navy 
commissions for colossal hosts and fleets ; the swollen 
pension-lists, not only military, but civil, literary, and 
political ; the Church preferment ; the court patronage 
to tradesmen ; the immense foreign service; and, finally, 
the dazzling rewards of titles, orders, and peerages. 
Consider alone the patronage of India, with its state 
railways and public works, an army of four hundred 
thousand men, and a parental government over a popu- 
lation of more than two hundred millions of souls. 

On this question of patronage I will instance just 
one item to illustrate what its splendors and magnitude 
and tempting prizes are under the English government. 
It is an item to which we have no equivalent at all, like 
the titles and orders and peerages and telegraph- and 
railway-service and foreign civil list, and other depart- 
ments. The bishoprics of the Church of England are 
in the gift of the government. There are twenty-eight 
of them and two archbishoprics. The Archbishop of 
Canterbury receives $7.5,000 a year and two official 
palaces for a residence, and holds office for life. The 
Archbishop of York gets $50,000 a year, and a palace 
and his office for life. Either of these positions, in the 
way of worldly emolument, is better than the Presi- 
dency of the United States. The twenty-eight bishops 
receive salaries ranging from $20,000 to $50,000 a 
year (they average over $25,000 a year), a residence, a 
seat in the House of Lords, and they have all this for 
life. The whole higher-class patronage in the gift of 
the United States, the Supreme bench, the Cabinet, the 
Vice-presidency, and our entire European diplomatic 
list, does not begin to approach in splendor or dignity 
or money value to this one item. The whole body of 
these great offices of our state are less in number than 
these bishoprics ; their salaries range but from $7500 
to $17,500; there are no official residences attached, 
and they are not held for life. 

V. This ecclesiastical item of patronage suggests one 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. I57 

of the ugliest of all the problems of European politics, 
— one which is a danger and burden to every European 
Government to-day, but from which our country hap- 
pily is and always has been entirely free, — the vexed 
question of Church and State. The Established Church 
of England, a Church embracing a minority only of the 
people, is a part of the Government of England. The 
head of the Church is the head of the State ; its 
bishops, by virtue of their mitres, sit in Parliament; its 
clergy are necessarily a kind of national police. The 
Church is in the very Constitution. Its interests enter 
sharply into every party platform and struggle. They 
fought over the Irish-Church disestablishment a few 
years ago, — they are going to fight soon over English 
disestablishment. As a consequence, the clerical inter- 
est goes actively into the political campaigns in a way 
that rather shocks our American sense of propriety. 
The clergy assist at the nominations, and the Church 
vote at the polls is cast on as purely selfish and grace- 
less principles as would be the Irish or negro ballot in 
our cities. The alliance of the Church and liquor in- 
terests — ^' beer and Bibles'^ — is one of the open scandals 
of the recent elections. Further, this marriage of 
Church and State makes an appeal to religious hatreds 
and fanaticism, the most dangerous and wicked of all 
passions, an efi^ective political weapon always on hand 
and useful. A vulgar anti-popery speech that, in the 
United States, would hardly be tolerated, is acceptable 
and effective on most English hustings. Thus it comes 
that premiers and cardinal-princes are writing hotly on 
questions which we have removed entirely from the 
field of popular passion. 

While the situation of Church and State in England 
is indecorous and embarrassing to Transatlantic view, 
it is only that, and not a danger, as it is to most of the 
other European nations. In Italy the Church is a vast 
octopus, with its dank, flaccid arms sucking at every 
pore of the Stg-te. The fight of Germany with Rome 

14 



158 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

is historic and inherited. At this very hour the inflam- 
mable question of French politics is the expulsion of 
the Jesuits. Even Japan has just got through a gi- 
gantic civil war to decide this very question, — the su- 
premacy of Tycoon or Mikado. We alone of all 
nations have not inherited in our politics this brand of 
discord, which has been the occasion of more wars in 
Christendom than any one other cause, — perhaps of more 
than all others combined. 

VI. We have no foreign relations, no entangling al- 
liances, no responsibilities or obligations outside of our- 
selves. With every European people this is the main 
field of politics. The nation itself is but the starting- 
point of government. The real work is ramified and 
spread all over the continent, perhaps all over the world. 
Not a step can be taken without consulting other nations 
and understanding their interests. Europe is as we would 
be were all the States of our Union independent, antago- 
nistic, and with inherited animosities of blood, race, and 
faith, with diverse languages, modes of thought, and 
political traditions, and with the quarrels and revenges 
of a thousand years to settle. It is this that makes the 
minister of state so important a personage in European 
government and so often its head. Following traditional 
forms, we have made our Secretary of State the head of 
our Cabinet, but it is only a survival. He is but a 
shadow, for happily we have no foreign affairs. It is 
this also which produces the broad scholarship and in- 
tellectual supremacy of the European statesman, and 
drives the demagogue and the half-educated out of the 
field of politics. Our Monroe doctrine is a political 
blessing, but it necessarily limits the range and powers 
of our public men, because it limits the demands and 
the strain on them. It deprives them of the compara- 
tive study of politics and history, which European poli- 
tics, on the other hand, enforce and necessitate. And 
comparative study has been the law of all advancement 
in thought and science in this century. 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. I59 

The general elections of 1880 in England were fought 
on issues almost entirely outside of England, and they 
involved an intelligent knowledge not only of modern 
continental politics and history, but of the Greek, Ot- 
toman, and Asiatic civilizations. Just imagine the 
statesman of Kentucky or Nebraska being called on 
for this kind of work ! Or how many members are 
there in any State delegation in Congress whom we 
could trust to vote for us on such questions when the 
consequence of an ignorant or reckless vote might be 
war? 

VII. Finally, the critical responsibilities of govern- 
ment in our country are a mere nothing compared with 
those which immediately and forever confront the Eu- 
ropean statesman. We never feel them ; they are never 
brought home either to the people or to the legislator. 

The European statesman legislates with a sword sus- 
pended over his head. He deals with armed nations 
ready to strike. Vast camps of populations surround 
his own, in fatal readiness to move at a signal. A 
false vote, and before it was circulated through the 
kingdom hostile bayonets would be swarming across 
the frontier, and hostile artillery thundering over the 
land. Within twenty-four hours after a declaration of 
war by Germany or France or Italy or Russia, the cav- 
alry would be over the border. A legislative debate in 
Europe may be like brandishing a torch In a powder- 
magazine. 

The European statesman, further, has absolutely no 
margin on which to make mistakes in home affairs, 
either. He deals with a discontented people, a bur- 
dened people, a suffering people. With the utmost 
wisdom and prudence, the average lot of the people 
will not be a pleasant one. Imprudent or ignorant 
legislation will bring suffering to many and sure death 
to some. How different the situation from ours where 
the land, from one end to the other, is one happy field, 
with a whole nation garnering smiling harvests, or at 



160 



ENGLISH POLITICS. 



cheerful and contented work in its shops and factories ! 
We have an illimitable margin for legislative mistake. 
No blunder costs us either blood or money that we feel. 
We are living like spendthrifts on accumulated capital. 
This country would have been wrecked a dozen times 
within living memory by its ignorant leadership had we 
had the same narrow margin to go on for errors as 
have the European nations. When that time comes in 
which a foolish word may precipitate a war, an indis- 
creet tax raise a riot, or a blunder of political economy 
result in national convulsion, then we will begin to 
appreciate the value of education in government, and 
of the scholar in politics. 

Let me recapitulate briefly, in such form that the 
eye may take it in at a glance, some of the main points 
of this imperfect contrast between the involved politics 
of the Old World and the simple field of the New. So 
shall we better see the different manner of public men 
that the two fields call for : 



England. 

One-third of the globe and 
one-fourth of its population. 
The empire scattered over all 
the continents. 

A social structure of many- 
classes, with unlike interests 
and vested rights. 

An imperial government, ad- 
ministered through the Parlia- 
ment, of one kingdom, and 
using all known kinds of po- 
litical machinery. 

Distribution and control of 
enormous government patron- 
age. Civil service, immense 
foreign service, military, naval, 
Church, titles, orders, peerage, 
public works, railways, tele- 
graph, etc. 



The United States. 

A moderate and contiguous 
territory. 



One homogeneous people. 



One simple form of govern- 
ment, with uniform machinery. 



Moderate 
tronage. 



government pa- 



COMPARATIVE POLITICS. 



161 



England. 

Church and State, — infinite 
political and religious compli- 
cations. 

Established and involved for- 
eign relations. Responsibilities 
in common. The nation only 
a component part of the conti- 
nent. 

No margin for political or 
legislative mistakes. 

In the midst of armed powers 
with colossal armies. Huge 
standing: armies. 



The United States. 
None. 

None. Monroe doctrine. 



Wide marsrin. 



No armies without or within. 



An increasing national debt. A decreasing national debt. 



A discontented people. Emi- 
gration. 

A people taxed to their ut- 
most capacity. 

Ignorant lower classes. 



A contented people. Immi- 
gration. 

A generous margin for tax- 
ation. 

A general common educa- 
tion. 



Is it any wonder that European politics evolve a 
stronger order of men than do ours ? When you meet 
or hear or read the English statesman, you feel the 
immediate contrast, and a little study of the country 
shows how different are all the conditions of his life 
and work. 

The English statesman must be an educated man, 
for he deals with educated forces and with history. 

He generally springs from the upper classes, and has 
that knowledge of society which comes from looking 
from the top down, and not from the bottom up. So 
far — and it strikes the American with a strong impres- 
sion — the higher culture of Great Britain governs it, 
although it has little in common with the mental or 
religious life of the body of the people, and no sym- 
l 14* 



IQ2 ENGLISH POLITICS. 

pathy at all with their social life. But this is changing : 
the governing power is passing every year farther 
down the social scale. 

The English statesman, finally, is mostly a man of 
means. He has leisure to study for his work, and 
independence to do as he thinks best. Politics is not 
with him a means of making a livelihood. 

London. 



LONDON. 



163 



CHAPTER XIX. 

WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

A Sermon in Stone — The Peace or the Grave — How a 
Grave in Westminster Abbey Comes — A Monumental 
Epitome of English History — England's Worship of 
Courage — Our Country in the Abbey — The Birth-Spot 
OF THE "Shorter Catechism" — "The Elect of Eng- 
land's Dead." 

It was my good fortune to be shown the treasures 
and beauties of AYestminster Abbey by its scholarly 
and accomplished dean, whose reputation and fame are 
as broad in all our land and in all the learned world 
as his own broad sympathies and the generous gospel 
he preaches so boldly in the first of English churches. 
I shall not attempt a picture of this historic fane, which 
rises so stately here, and which stands perhajis in still 
statelier and more unattainable proportions in the imagi- 
nation of all read and cultured Americans. I will not 
even speak here of the sermons I heard of two of its 
greatest preachers, Dean Stanley himself and Canon 
Farrar, reserving the opportunity to touch on them in 
a later letter on the London pulpit, when a larger com- 
parative hearing of its eminent men shall have qualified 
me to write of it with more information and judgment. 

I would not write with the rapid pen and flow of 
newspaper work of AVestminster Abbey, which centres 
and sums up in itself all of English history, and which, 
year by year, gathers to its bosom the best and greatest 
of England's men. Its picturing or treatment demands 
long and special study, and any other treatment is an 
injustice alike to the spot and to the reader. I sup- 
pose, indeed, that many of my countrymen to whom 

165 



166 LONDON. 

the venerable pile is familiar by painting and engrav- 
ing and the allusions of literature may feel somewhat 
disappointed at the mention of its name without an 
effort at its description. There are those, however, 
whose lives have been a labor of love in. its service, and 
who have written fully, authoritatively, and responsibly. 
To their works I refer all across the water who would 
see or know the best that pen and pencil can do for the 
abbey. Or, better yet, come and see it. 

"They sleep with their fathers.^^ It was a noble in- 
stinct, worthy of illustrating its age, whatever that age 
was, which first conceived the idea of making the 
churches of England the tombs of its great dead, and 
Westminster Abbey has been highly favored of history 
and of England in becoming the shrine of the nation. 
" Let us here praise famous men and our fathers that 
begat us.'' It is the one thing which I most envy of 
Europe, this wealth of its great men and the noble and 
beautiful use which it may make and does make of 
their graves, by which it carries down through the 
centuries what is best of them, keeping their memory 
green and imperishable, but, more than that, trans- 
fusing, as it were, their virtues into the daily life and 
generation of the hour. Here they lie in stately tombs 
all over England, the men who have deserved well of 
their country, who have served their fellow-men, who 
have honored their race, — the soldiers, the philanthro- 
pists, the teachers, — a lesson, a stimulus, an inspiration, 
to all that come after them. And it is alike to the 
honor of England, and convincing evidence of her 
moral vigor and integrity and of long national life yet 
to come, that this recognition, these great honors, are 
open to all. Riches will not buy a tomb in West- 
minster Abbey, nor a life of ostentation and luxury 
and display ; but its walls are free to the young lieu- 
tenant, the young clergyman, the sailor or private 
soldier or drummer or cabin-boy, who does his duty, 
and dies in doing it. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEV. 167 

Perhaps the distinctive feature of Westminster Abbey 
to a thoughtful stranger is the wonderful catholicity 
of its tombs. We unconsciously think of it as an aris- 
tocratic burial-place of the Established Church of Eng- 
land, — words of limitation. We find its consecrated 
crypts open to humanity, — literally, to all the world. 
It has been eloquently called the '^temple of silence 
and conciliation," and this language is the literal truth. 
Variances of faiths, harsh judgments on personal lives, 
the asperities of politics, the rancorous struggles of 
ambition, the bitterness of parties, — all are forgotten in 
its still and passionless chapels where side by side sleep 
friend and foe. The clangor of arms and the damna- 
tory clauses of old creeds are hushed in its hallowed 
and silent aisles. Here, walking among its graves, 
eloquent in their mute and voiceless expression, one 
comes again and again on tombs or monuments of men 
almost startling you by their associations or the dra- 
matic contrast of their lives with their last resting- 
place. You find in a place of honor " John and 
Charles W^esley,'^ their tablet legended '^ My parish 
is the world," — the founders of Methodism in the 
pantheon of the Anglican Church. You pause in- 
voluntarily at the name of John Bradshaw, the regi- 
cide judge, and president of the fatal court. Cromwell 
and the two Charleses and General Monk sleep near 
together. An English mob, in unhappier times, once 
rifled the tomb of the Puritan statesman and soldier 
and scattered his dust and bones, but the empty grave 
and its inscribed slab are still there in memory and 
honor of the man. John Dryden, the Roman Catho- 
lic; Isaac Watts, the nonconformist; Mrs. Siddons, 
the actress ; Kemble, the actor ; Congreve, the play- 
writer of broad freedom, to speak gently near his ashes; 
Casaubon, the Frenchman ; Spanheim, the Swiss ; 
Theodorus Paleologus, the Greek ; some of the family 
of Louis Philippe, — all lie peacefully in the resting 
ranks of the noble army of its dead. It might be easy 



168 LONDON. 

enough to lay most of these men here now in our 
better and gentler times^ but think of the bitter pas- 
sions of older days when statesmen paid with their 
heads for political mistakes, think of the merciless and 
ignorant hatred which so short a time ago passed for 
religion and faith, and you can begin to gauge the 
strength of mind and moral courage and nobility ahead 
of their generation of the men who dug some of these 
graves, and who recognized in advance of their time 
the peace of the grave. 

Honor to whom honor is due. The honor for this 
great service to humanity is due of recent history ulti- 
mately to the dean of Westminster (and in earlier cen- 
turies, I suppose, to the abbot), who is finally responsible 
for every tomb, monument, or inscription in the church, 
and whose veto can exclude anybody, living or dead, 
and any tablet. Let me explain a moment how a grave 
in Westminster comes, how the greatest honor England 
can bestow is given. It is so thoroughly illustrative of 
the interior of English life, of a power of tradition and 
usage of which we know absolutely nothing, and which 
we can hardly understand or comprehend at all, that 
time is not lost in learning it. This great honor, for 
which kings hope and prelates strive and soldiers die, 
rests in law to-day, entirely and absolutely, in the hands 
of one man, — the dean of the Abbey. He can bury any 
one in the Abbey he pleases and he can close its doors 
against any one he pleases, and there is no power in the 
land that can force or control his judgment or discretion 
in the matter, save, of course, the special action, in a 
special case, of Parliament, which, unlike our Congress, 
limited in its power and field of action, is "supreme, 
irresistible, and uncontrollable" in all things and over 
all men in England. It is one of those instances con- 
tinually arising out of the fortuitous historical develop- 
ment of England in which enormous powers or public 
trusts or franchises have come into the hands of some 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 169 

one man or class, who are responsible for their use only to 
their own honor and conscience and the general sense of a 
whole people, which generally in some way enforces itsown 
will. And a vast body of such usages, powers, vested 
rights, and franchises, ecclesiastical and civil and poli- 
tical, which no one has ever attempted to enumerate or 
define, and which no one here would define if he could, 
and of which there is nowhere any written or authori- 
tative record, is the Constitution of England. Compare 
this condition of things with the carefully-written paper 
which is our Constitution, and you have some idea of 
the organic differences of the two Governments, — the 
one a growth, the other as yet a pure construction. 
This fact is the great and foundation difference between 
English and American politics, and the reason why 
the acts of one are often no precedent for the other. 

As a matter of fact, Dean Stanley, as any strong man 
would in a similar position, feels bound to act as the 
propliet and interpreter of the English ])eople in the 
discharge of this unique and singularly high trust, and 
does, as have the deans of Westminster before him. 
While the exercise of such sole and irresponsible power 
looks dangerous to the American mind, accustomed to 
the careful distribution of responsibilities and the deli- 
cate balance of powers, it has many advantages apparent 
at a glance. The popular feeling generally obtains its 
will, but it is regulated, restrained perhaps for a time, 
by the sounder and truer judgment of an educated and 
cultivated man, who can also by his power of veto not 
only prevent indecorous burials, which might be forced 
under temporary impulse or immature sentiment, but 
save the building: from the profanation of crude inscrip- 
tions, born of ignorance, passion, or bad taste. Indeed, 
the present dean has done an acknowledged service, 
not only to England, but to the English language, in 
the regulation of the mural legends and inscriptions 
which have been placed in the Abbey during his long 
incumbency. As a whole work they show a marked 
H 15 



170 ■ LONDON. 

force, elegance, and good taste that in future times 
will be noted and remembered to the credit of our 
century. 

A stroll through the aisles and cloisters of this great 
church awakens the echoes of history and starts associa- 
tions almost at every step which lead one to the outer 
confines of our knowledge — political, religious, and 
social — of ourselves. 

Here, in the ancient Chapter-House, a perfectly cir- 
cular room, on rude stone benches continuous around 
the wall in three tiers, without arms or railing or rest 
of any kind, for three hundred years sat the Parliaments 
of England. 

Here, in the Jerusalem Chamber, a modest kind of 
vestry room, storied in legend as the death-scene of 
Henry IV., juggled by a pro})hecy, was framed and 
published " The Shorter Catechism,'' that famous com- 
pendium of Presbyterian belief. How many of our 
American Presbyterians ever think of the "Assembly 
of Westminster Divines" as assembled and working at 
this historic Anglican centre ? 

In this same room sat and worked the men who pro- 
duced the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 
the form in which it is now used in England. And, to 
keep up the chain of historical tradition in this line, the 
modern " Committee for the Revision of the Bible" is 
to-day sitting in this chamber invested with such dis- 
tinguished e(;clesiastical associations. 

Here once was the " treasury of the kings of Eng- 
land," and here now all the official gold and silver 
standards of the coin of the realm are under royal lock 
and key. 

Here, too, opening out of the dean's private study, is 
the simple closet, now disused, but which once served 
for the kee})ing of the crown jewels and regalia, of 
which the dean and chapter are still the legal and con- 
structive keepers, and which, on the eve of the corona- 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 171 

tion-day of every monarch, are yet brought to the Abbey 
and kept there over-night, that they may be ready for 
the ceremony of the morning ; for the coronation of 
every king or queen of England takes place in this 
church in front of the Chapel of Henry VII. These 
jewels are the gorgeous collection of crowns and coronets 
and sceptres and royal swords and gold and silver and 
diamonds familiar to all who have visited the Tower of 
London. Although in the constructive keeping of the 
Abbey, these regal valuables are by statute in the actual 
charge as deposits of the constable of the Tower, who is 
supposed to have the safest place in the kingdom either 
for state prisoners or state projierty. 

Here, in silent admonitory state, among the dusty 
tombs of the sovereigns who have sat in it, stands the 
coronation chair. Under its seat, and part of it now, is 
the famous " Stone of Scone,'' the rude throne of the 
old Scottish chiefs, and which Scottish tradition and 
relic-worship assert to be the very stone on which the 
patriarch Jacob rested his head for a pillow when he 
slept and saw his glorious vision of power and long life 
and God's protection, — " the Shepherd and the Stone 
of Israel." 

Here, by a dark and narrow stairway, you ascend to 
the small, rude, touching Chapel of Henry V., swung 
in the air, the solid stone steps worn almost into cups 
by the feet of devoted worshippers, who for centuries 
have climbed its hard, bare way to hear mass and pray 
by the body of their dead, loved king, the saddle and 
the helmet of Agincourt keeping solemn guard over the 
warrior at rest forever. On the Continent I saw many 
impressive altnrs in crypts and corners and dramatic 
situations, but I remember none in the unique position 
of this one, raised high into the air, on a level above 
the main altar of the church, and looking down on all 
around it. 

But why lengthen out detached pictures where every 
foot is illustrative, where every stone is eloquent, where 



172 LONDON. 

every aisle and corridor and archway is tremulous with 
the memories of centuries? 

Westminster Abbey, with its picturesque Old English 
architecture, so thoroughly ecclesiastical, so rich, so ele- 
gant; with its cloisters and venerable aisles, shadowy 
with the associations of legend, history, and tradition ; 
with its stately tombs, the grand records of England's 
glories, learning, and faith ; with its historic chapels and 
crumbling stones and time-stained walls hung with 
dropping banners or crowded with suggestive inscrip- 
tions, is one of those places which, like Niagara, cannot 
disappoint. One need not fear to see it lest the sight 
should dissolve cherished dreams or beautiful images. 
No matter what one's range of reading, no matter what 
one's fund of learning, no matter what one's sweep and 
realm of imagination, the fair fabric of fact stands for- 
ever, grander than dream or fancy, a living sermon in 
stone. 

I could not help thinking, whenever I passed this 
historic spot, of the riches with which England is 
dowered in this single church, and my mind reverts to 
the reflection again and again as I think how long, 
long, long it must be before we can be equally favored. 
It is a foundation with which no college can ever be 
endowed, — a perpetual lesson and education. " Re- 
member the days of old ; consider the years of many 
generations." 

Wandering through Westminster Abbey, as in all the 
churches of England, there is forced on one a sense of 
the great honors which England pays to her soldiers.. 
I think that in the cathedrals and churches of the 
kingdoui a larger proportion of soldiers lie buried in 
state, or have their names recorded in memorial legend 
if they have died on foreign fields, than any one other 
class, not even excepting the clergy, whose homes have 
been these buildings, and who themselves in former 
times have played so great a part in history. At every 
step their stately tombs or eloquent tablets arrest you ; 



WESTMINSTER ABBE r. 173 

their still stone effigies rest under the gathering dusts 
of every century ; '' their good swords rust'' on every 
wall : " their souls are with the Lord, we trust." 

It is this cultus of courage and force which has made 
England, and it is these honors which make her men 
soldiers. While there is something in her present mil- 
itary organization and structure which seems to produce 
deficient generalship, or prevent the development and 
coming forward of the real military genins which is 
snrely in her armies, the soldierly qualities of the body 
of her officers are something wonderful and w^orthy of 
the highest admiration, — their fidelity, their personal 
chivalry in moments of danger, their perfect willing- 
ness and readiness to die. Her gentlemen leave homes 
of loveliness and cultivation and refinement unequalled 
on the face of the globe, and die every year, every day, 
almost, old and young, on the plains of Asia, in the 
forests of Africa, in fever-swamp and desert-sands, 
cheerfully and uncomplainingly. Hardly a country 
home in England but has its soldier's grave somewhere 
in the uttermost parts of the earth where England is 
pushing her imperial arms. And that all this sacrifice 
is made in the face of a general sense of uneasiness and 
want of confidence in the ability of the directing power 
makes it all the more wonderful. "Somebody blun- 
dered" at Balaklava, just as they did at Braddock's 
Field and Bunker's Hill, and before the cotton-bales 
of New Orleans in 1812, and among the kraals of Zu- 
luland, and in the canons of Afghanistan this fatal 
year ; but still the British soldier, gentleman and yeo- 
man, is ever ready, with his life in his hand, to go for- 
ward. It is these tombs in the old cathedrals. 

Passing from the ancient abbots' palace, now the 
dwelling of the dean, by private entrance to the church, 
just before we entered the transept of the main build- 
ing Dean Stanley, to whom my presence started recol- 
lections of Philadelphia, said, " Stop a moment ; I want 

15* 



174 LONDON. 

to show you something that will remind you of home," 
and ascending by a side entry three narrow steps, into 
a little chapel shut off by an open railing from public 
entrance, we stood suddenly before the handsome me- 
morial window of Mr. Chi Ids to the two English poets, 
— a grand blaze of illumination, covering almost an 
entire wall of the chapel. It is a beautiful and costly 
work of art, in the conventional ecclesiastical style of 
glass-painting, rich and impressive. 

It is the usage in the Abbey to inscribe on all monu- 
ments the incident of their erection, and the story of 
this one is very simply and frankly told in a single line: 

" D. D.^ Georgius Gtclielmus Childs. Clvis Aonericanus." 

This is the first appearance of our country in the his- 
toric Abbey. There are a few other American names, — 
some loyal refugees in the war of 1776-83, some colo- 
nial worthies, some British soldiers killed in the Revo- 
lution and French wars, — but this is the only inscription 
which distinctly places the new nation of " the United 
States of America" in the monumental archives of 
Westminster. 

LONDOlf. 

* Donum dedit. 



, \ 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 175 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE L0ND02^^ PULPIT. 

Dean Stanley in Westminster Abbey — Canon Farrar at 
St. Margaret's — St. Paul's Cathedral — Cardinal 
Manning in the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington — Rev. 
Mr. Haweis at Marylebone — The English Clergy as 
Public Men. 

To an American imagination there is no preacher in 
all the world who has a grander pulpit than he who 
speaks in Westminster Abbey. It is an inspiration to 
stand there. The scene of an ordinary afternoon ser- 
vice is itself a dramatic one. From the little pulpit at 
the corner of the transept the preacher sees a living sea 
of heads stretching out every broad aisle as far as the 
voice will reach. The wave of his audience overflows 
even the generous provision of the seats and surges up 
and over the tombs of the historic dead. On the con- 
fines of the seated congregation throng dark clouds of 
standing listeners, moving restlessly for some coign of 
vantage, pressing forward anxiously and expectant as 
when some great speech is to be delivered in a Parlia- 
ment. This, at least, is the scene which every Sunday 
greets the eye of Dean Stanley, who is one of the liiost 
popular preachers in London. This popularity comes 
solely, too, from the spirit and tone of his sermons, for 
tlieir delivery breaks their eflFect rather than adds to it. 
The dean reads his sermons, which is the murder of ora- 
tory, and few voices if any can reach the outer edges of 
the vast audience which gathers in the spacious gray- 
stone halls of the nave and transept. It is the ex- 
quisite English of these sermons and their gentle cath- 
olic spirit which draws all London and all the world of 
travel to hear them. Dean Stanley's spare form and 



1 76 LONDON. 

kindly features are so well known now in our country 
that the American traveller does not feel as a stranger 
when on entering ^he church he sees the familiar face 
in the reading-desk or pulpit. 

London is the vortex of the world, Westminster is 
the heart of London, and its preacher is so thoroughly 
in all the currents of modern life that one loses in every 
sermon of Dean Stanley^s the more delicate touches, the 
keener allusions, — the more effective because so deftly 
veiled, — if he is not thoroughly familiar with all 
the higher movements of the hour. Here in a very 
striking sense '' the parish is the world,^' and Dean 
Stanley has all the tact of a born journalist in harness- 
ing the events of each day to the chariot of his work. 

When I first heard him the text was a clause of Scrip- 
ture, — '^the service of the sanctuary." The theme, how- 
ever, was strictly "the Book of Common Prayer," its 
historic associations and growth, its spirit, and mainly 
and practically the question of the expediency or pro- 
priety of its emendation now. However scholarly or 
critical the treatment of this subject, — and this sermon 
^vas both,— the theme, in such a temple and before a 
Church-of-England audience, must of necessity involve 
panegyric, and that it might not lead to narrowing 
opinion or the nurture of prejudice the preacher with 
fine tact prefaced his discourse by recalling as appro- 
priate to the subject and the day that this very Sunday 
was the anniversary of that historic occasion when the 
service of the Established Church of England was read 
for the first time and the last time in the national 
Church of Scotland. Then, in perfectly impartial and 
dispassionate words and in a tone and voice colorless of 
the slightest trace of feeling or judgment, he related 
the story of that famous scene in Edinboro^ when Janet 
Geddes threw the footstool at the dean of Edinboro's 
head just as he began to read the collect for the day, — 
the same collect in which we had all joined that very 
hour, — the uproar and confusion, the broken and ended 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 177 

service, and the historical consequences of the event. 
That picture, drawn so cahiily, all the passions of the 
time faded out with the years, as lifeless and departed 
as if veritably entombed with the dead of centuries 
that lay all around us, made its own argument. The 
audience stood at once on the catholic plane of the 
preacher. 

On the question of amendment now — the practical 
body of the discourse — the dean was direct and ex- 
plicit. Noble as was the book, grand as were its asso- 
ciations, it was a living growth and must change. It 
had defects, the legacies of times not so fortunate or 
blessed with light as ours, and they should be amended; 
the sooner the better. The specific changes suggested 
and pointed out as desirable were one and all in the 
line of broadening the Church and opening wide its 
doors, — wide and loving as the arms of its Founder. 
Among those instanced were the expurgation of the 
sweeping damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed ; 
also the abolition of that rubric which forbids the burial 
prayers of the Church to be read over the body " of a 
man of the purest and most blameless life if he be- 
longed, say, to that most excellent and pious people, 
the Friends, instead of the Established Church," or 
'' even over the most innocent of little children, those 
little children of whom Christ Himself said, 'Of such 
is the kingdom of heaven.^ " Anotiier change urged 
was the wording of those special prayers for rain which 
seem to assume that the favors of nature are sent upon 
the just and its disfavors upon the unjust, contrary to 
tlie now clearly acknowledged teachings of the New 
Testament. 

In Westminster Abbey the service is rather a medium 
between the High Church intoning of England and the 
severely plain enunciation demanded with us. When 
it was over and the sermon finished the congregation 
slowly dispersed, not with a rush to the streets, but 
lingering kindly and lovingly in the cool gray shades 



178 LONDON. 

of the tombs and arched aisles, and there were no im- 
patient vergers or janitors hanging around to hustle out 
the last lingerers and close inhospitable doors. 

In the yard of Westminster Abbey, a solid pavement 
of flat tombs, stands the parish church of St. Margaret. 
St. Margaret's Parish is the flrst parish in the kingdom, 
for in its bounds rise both Houses of Parliament, and, 
I think, the official residences of all the government. 
The Speaker of the House of Commons, the Speaker of 
the House of Lords, and most of the great officials of 
state are always members of this parish. Until within 
a very few years the House of Commons was accus- 
tomed to attend this church in state, as provided in the 
Prayer-book. 

Westminster Abbey, although it fills so large a space 
in London in American imagination, has no territorial 
jurisdiction. An abbey is something to which we have 
no equivalent in Protestant America. It is a college of 
priests, — a point or foundation purely for worship of 
God, unclogged by any congregational cares or limita- 
tions. It has no congregation in our sense. There is 
regular service and it is free to all, but it goes on 
whether any persons from outside come or not. 

Dr. F. W. Farrar, whose name as a popular author 
is so familiar on both sides of the sea, is the rector or 
pastor of St. Margaret's, and he is so by virtue of holding 
a canon ry in Westminster Abbey. St. Margaret's, too, 
is a stimulating house in which to preach. It is part 
of the fabric of the English Constitution; the strongest 
legislation in the world throbs at its very side, and the 
congregation must always hold some of the ablest and 
most influential men living. Add to this that there is 
not a Sunday but when, in addition to the permanent 
congregation, there are to be found among the hearers 
distinguished men of all peoples, — statesmen, thinkers, 
writers, soldiers, — who come as strangers and travellers, 
unknown and unseen, but none the less critical and ob- 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 179 

serving. In fact, they are making up the verdict of the 
world. 

The interior of St. Margaret's is very plain. It was 
the ordinarv rectano-ular American church or meeting- 
house, with four white walls, and the entire floor filled 
with plain wooden high-backed pews. Fine stained- 
glass windows and some historic names graven on mural 
tablets, — Sir Walter Raleigh lies in.the chancel, — relieve 
the room from absolute sameness and furnish that rest 
-to the eye which one finds so grateful in the churches 
of Europe, and which he so soon learns to look for. 

The conduct of the service was correspondingly 
simple. Both the prayers and the psalms were read so 
that each word was intelligible. There was neither in- 
toning nor drawling. Going to St. Margaret's with the 
consciousness that I was seeing one of the high-places 
of the Church of England, it was something of a sur- 
prise to hear the first hymn given out, — 

"Come let us join our cheerful songs 
"VVitli angels round the throne," 

and to have it followed by — 

" How sweet the name of Jesus sounds 
In a believer's ear !" 

two hymns in common use by every denomination in 
the United States. And both were sung to airs famil- 
iar in all Presbvterian and Con2:rea:ational churches, 
and the singing was by the entire congregation. 

Dr. Farrar, a dark, brown-faced man with a pleasant 
countenance, preached from Galatians, the first verse of 
the fifth chapter, — " the liberty with which Christ hath 
made us free." It M^as the broadest of broad-church 
sermons, the special dangers to Christian freedom 
from the side of ecclesiastical organization being the 
drift of the discourse, and at times the argument seemed 
to press certain practical applications on home issues 
not immediately discernible to a stranger. I could 



180 LONDON. 

only quote from recollection, and should be afraid to 
attempt" for fear of being charged with misquotation, 
but it is sufficient to say that Canon Farrar was as 
latitudinarian as St. Paul himself, and would probably 
have been pronounced unorthodox on the Church ques- 
tion from many a Baptist, Lutheran, or Presbyterian 
pulpit in the United States. He went the length of 
accepting literally the sayings of the New Testament, 
translating them into the language and applying them 
to the situation of the day. He is out and out a 
disciple of St. Paul. Indeed, it is observable how 
thoroughly Pauline preaching is the rule in the Church 
of England, wliich is suffering a kind of recoil from 
theological disputation, and to-day sees the old doctrinal 
lines broken at many a point without apparently think- 
ing of even an effort to defend them. 

I have mentioned that this sermon seemed to be 
bearing on some home question of church government 
or policy not entirely clear to a passing visitor. It is 
worthy of remark that nearly every sermon I heard in 
London bore directly on some imminent matter, — some 
great question of modern thought or action, — and that 
the preacher spoke as a lawyer before a bench of judges 
or a jury does, directly to the point, with the view of 
convincing some person or persons on a given issue and 
at that time. 

I w^as not fortunate enough to hear Canon Liddon, 
of St. Paul's Cathedral, who is ranked by many at the 
head of the London pulpit in the way of combining 
both scholarship and popular oratorical power. He 
was sick and off duty during my three visits to London. 

St. Paul's, although dwarfed in American interest by 
Westminster Abbey, is to Englishmen probably the 
greater church of the two, and it is always and for any 
one a most impressive house of worship. It is the 
cathedral church of the diocese of London and the 
most prominent building in all that huge city, being in 



THE LONDON PULPIT. \^\ 

size tlie third largest church in Christendom. It is the 
great monument of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, 
who got $1000 a year for building it. The bishop of 
London now gets $50,000 a year. The dean of St. 
Paul's also now receives $10,000 a year, and a staff of 
canons $5000 a year each, for conducting service in it. 
Then there are also archdeacons, prebendaries, minor 
canons, and the usual equipment of lesser officers, — chan- 
cellor, register, and clerks of many kinds. 

St. Paul's Cathedral stands now right in the heart of 
business London. Its once cloistered walks are busy 
marts, and it is a dramatic surprise to pass in a few steps 
almost, out of the Bank of England, heated, panting 
with the pulses of the trade of the world, into the cool, 
calm shades of a still cathedral where the service of 
w^orship is nearly always in progress. There are, I 
think, four services every day, and perhaps more on 
Sunday, but it would be, it struck me, a glorious asser- 
tion of religious life if they were made continuous day 
and night, and this magnificent temple, right in the 
heart of the dominion of Mammon in this world, were 
constituted a place where literally "prayer is made to 
God without ceasing." This idea flashed on. me like a 
wave of emotion within ten minutes after I first entered 
the great cathedral. I suggested it afterwards to an 
English clergyman, but could not impart to him my 
enthusiasm. He thought it w^ould 'Mvill the clergy." 
I would sav, " Kill them." If men can die for their 
country on a desolate and barren battle-field, why not for 
the glory of God in a comfortable cathedral ? 

The service of St. Paul's is a great work of art con- 
ducted w^ith all the highest accessories of music and 
ecclesiastical stage effect. It was entirely intoned, and 
not a word of the priest was intelligible, at least to a 
non-English stranger. For one not accustomed to the 
traditional stage delivery of the English altar the tongue 
might just as well have been Latin or Hebrew. The 
preacher and reader, however, were perfectly heard. 

16 



X82 LONDON. 

The ablest sermon I heard in St. Paul's was by the 
senior canon, Rev. Mr. Gregory. The bishop of the 
diocese had ordered prayers for good weather in all the 
churches, and Canon Gregory on this day preached to 
the order, taking for his theme the whole question of 
prayer for the specific direction or suspension of the laws 
of nature. The marked feature of this sermon was the 
extreme candor and fairness with which the preacher 
stated the position of his opponents on this matter in 
all its strength, without the least disposition to contort 
it or to blink the danger. He fairly admitted that the 
ground had shifted since the days of mediaeval thought, 
and made not the least attempt to hold it by appeals to 
transmitted ignorance or prejudice, but grappled with 
the issue in a way that showed a masterly study of the 
whole range of modern reading. It was the work of a 
strong man who knew there was a fight ahead and was 
ready for it. 

Like nearly all English clergymen. Canon Gregory 
preaches with a vigor, physical and intellectual, which 
tells of the broad foundation of the university and of 
generous and conscientious care of the body from youth 
upwards. He is a large man, of hearty address and 
that rare honesty of expression and manner that in- 
spires immediate confidence and trust. The close of 
St. Paul's, in which these canons live in low-roomed old- 
fashioned houses, with wrought-iron extinguishers and 
hooks for the link-boys' torches yet attached to their doors, 
is a most quaint old place which I despair of describing 
to those w^io have not seen it or something like it, but 
it is one of the best living reminiscences of Old London. 
It is in such out-of-the-way places not in the guide- 
books, or out of the reach of tourist curiosity, that one 
gets his freshest and best conception of past England. 
An old castle with the family still in it, their comfort- 
able every-day life blending through the slow succes- 
sion of centuries with the half-barbaric magnificence of 
their ancestors, a dark gray close with a deanery full of 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 183 

girls inheriting the substantial chib comforts of a line 
of dead abbots and their bachelor monks, are worth all 
the routine ruins and well-trodden ivy walls in the 
island. 

I first heard of the Rev. Charles Haweis many years 
ago, when I found his " Music and Morals^' in the 
meagre hut of a miner in the Rocky Mountains of 
Colorado, into which I had been driven by stress of 
weather to pass the night, and the singular contrast of 
the incident kept his name fixed in my attention. In 
London, Mr. Haweis is a very popular preacher, and 
his church rather a fashionable one in its own stratum 
of society. 

St. James of Marylebone is an old-fashioned church 
building such as you see yet in old parts of Philadel- 
phia and in many of the interior towns of Maryland 
and Pennsylvania. The old architectural interior has 
been religiously preserved, — low, long galleries, quaint 
pillars, high wooden pews, — but all the plain walls and 
woodwork are now done over in the glory of modern 
decorative effect, in gray and red and gold and glass. 
Indeed, it rather looks as if an energetic aesthetic club 
had been let loose on all the walls and wooden fronts. 
The rear end of the church, which serves as a back- 
ground for the altar, looks something like a huge il- 
luminated title-page, so elaborate is it in pictured glass 
and gold and neutral-tinted panels, all blazoned over 
with ecclesiastical and religious symbols. The altar 
itself was a narrow ledge against the base of the great 
w-indow. On it rested an elaborate cross in opaque 
glass or some similar material revealing itself very pret- 
tily with a kind of subdued brilliancy out of a wealth 
of flowers. Above the ledge arose a large rigid old- 
fashioned square arch or triangle, thus : A. Inside of 
the arch was a perfect circle of scroll-work of some kind ; 
inside of the circle a Greek cross, its four even arms 
touching the circumference, while its centre was a great 



184 LONDON. 

garnet-colored stone or piece of glass, which burned or 
glittered like a fiery eye, and more or less recalled the 
Shah of Persia or one's boyhood recollections of the 
" Arabian Nights." 

The congregation was ajDparently of the middle class, 
wealthy, comfortable, and uneducated. It was the 
most congregational service, however, I have ever seen. 
The Confession, Lord's Prayer, Creed, and most of the 
prayers were said by the whole people so well and 
spiritedly that the voice of the priest was never heard at 
all save when he sounded the leading note. The psalms 
of the day and the hymns were sung by the people, 
who carried on the whole service. In fact, the whole 
congregation seemed one body, a living being throbbing 
and pulsating with worship. It was a congregation 
very easy and pleasant to preach to, if one was its 
choice. It was harmonious, very earnest, and entirely 
satisfied with itself. Without knowino; anvthins: of 
them, I should venture the assertion that the body of 
the people are of the same class of society and have a 
high opinion of their own ^^ culture." 

Mr. Haweis is a good specimen of the popular 
preacher toned down by the social limitations of the 
Church of England. He has all the elements of a 
stump-speaker, but has never learned to sink the pulpit 
below the level of the stump, which is the usual work 
of an American sensational preacher. Mr. Haweis 
does not even approach this, for neither his education 
nor Marylebone would suffer it ; but somehow his man- 
ner suggests that under less fortunate conditions of cul- 
tivation he might have drifted that way. He has the 
best elements and force of the sensational preacher, 
without his vulgarity. In person Mr. Haweis is a dark, 
average-sized man, with black side-whiskers, and of a 
sanguine, bilious-looking temperament. His elocution 
is very English, apologetic, and with a great deal of 
hem-ing and haw-ing and aw-ing. His tones are also 
somewhat nasal, which is not English. 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 185 

The Roman Catholic pro-catheclral, which is said to 
be a kind of provisional tabernacle until the Church 
can make good its claim to St. Paul's or Westminster, 
is situated away out on the Kensington road, one-half 
mile by underground railway from Portland Place, and 
the aristocratic section of which that place is the centre. 
It is a fairly capacious but very plain church, with 
pews, little decoration in the way of painting and stat- 
uary, and looking not at all in its interior like the Ro- 
man churches of Ireland and Italy. Here I went to 
hear Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop 
of Westminster. 

Cardinal Manning is a tall, spare man, of feeble 
frame, with an emaciated and almost pallid face, ren- 
dered still more wan by hungry, cavernous eyes, — the 
true ecclesiastical type. He called up at once the polit- 
ical ecclesiastic of the sixteenth century. His wasted 
features are refined, scholarly, and intellectual. A 
movable scalp, causing his red skull-cap to move up 
and down, imparts ratlier a sinister effect and mars the 
general impression of his appearance. The thin figure 
and meagre, fleshless face suggest the mediaeval an- 
chorite, the sharp, severe outlines the Middle- Age in- 
quisitor, a man who would be honestly cruel, — cruel to 
himself as well as to others. 

And Cardinal Manning has been cruel to himself, 
mercilessly honest to his convictions, in leaving the 
green pastures and pleasant waters of the Established 
Church of England for the arid and unintellectual 
wastes of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain. 
There was no fashion at the pro-cathedral, no good so- 
ciety, no university, no influence, no cultivation. There 
were ignorant, new-made wealth and dull credulity and 
heavy mediocrity, but nothing better. It was a real 
sacrifice of the highest kind for this cultivated, learned, 
able man, the flower of English education, to be there. 

Cardinal Manning's sermon, as indeed was to be 
expected, was masterly and powerful. It was very 

16* 



Igg LONDON. 

earnest, and full of the wisdom of an old and wise 
man. It was severely plain in language and often 
very practical, but the whole interior train of thouglit 
and argument was entirely above the very inferior con- 
gregation which listened to it. They undoubtedly got 
good from it, but they never knew the perfection of 
the work. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to me that the 
great preacher was preaching two sermons simulta- 
neously, — one in the spirit to himself and any stray 
hearer that chanced to drop in, and another in the 
flesh of the word to the pitiful audience of the pro- 
cathedral. I think no educated man could have wit- 
nessed this scene without regret, no matter how w^idely 
he might have diifered from every word and conclusion 
of the ex-fellow of Oxford. The text of the sermon 
was the words, " Gold, frankincense, and myrrh," the 
subject, " Offering,'' — the dedication of everything to 
God ; one's whole self in every part, estate, body, 
mind. The treatment revealed a great deal of patristic 
reading, and the language recalled at times the late papal 
syllabus, " The characteristic of the XIX. century is 
mental aberration," and the remedy of the cardinal was 
simple and mechanical : Offer your mind as a sacrifice 
to God, — i.e., to the Roman Catholic Church. 

Cardinal Manning's delivery is very defective, and 
keeps one on the stretch all the time. Owing to loss 
of teeth, perhaps, one word out of every eight or ten 
drops out entirely, and, as his sermons are of that un- 
usual order that one wants to hear every word of them, 
the loss is very serious. In speaking. Cardinal Man- 
ning clenched the rail of the pulpit-box with both his 
])allid fists, like an English statesman on the hustings, 
and ejected rather than delivered his words, as if half 
embarrassed. He wore a scarlet cap and scarlet robe. 
In quoting Latin, it was rather significant that he used 
the continental pronunciation, abandoning the English 
system of his own university training. 

The pro-cathedral is not the first Roman Catholic 



THE LONDON PULPIT. 187 

cluircli in London. That is St. George's Cathedral, 
across the river from Westminster bridge. In this 
pro-cathedral, when Cardinal Manning preached, the 
pews were gnarded and a sixpence demanded for an 
ordinary seat, a shilling for the better ones. The ser- 
mon was preached for a charity, and the money thus 
secured went to it in addition to the special collection 
taken up. The force of priests at the altar was not 
strong. Mass was more reverently gone through than 
in the perfunctory Italian style, but with less regard 
to the scenic proprieties, and with an utter want of 
tlie sense of dress and drapery that was thoroughly 
English. 

The preachers with a Transatlantic fame of other 
churches were not as conspicuous in the winter of 
1879-80 as some years before. Irving, the leader of 
the famous apostolic movement, was dead. Spurgeon 
was in Italy in search of health, perhaps of life. The 
great orator of the Congregationalist denomination was 
in the divorce court. And so it happens that the view 
of this letter is confined to the Roman and English 
State-Churches. 

In London the pulpit is a much stronger social force 
than in any city in our country, and the men who fill it 
take a much greater and more influential share in the 
general public life. There are reasons in the structure 
of English society for this. 

The bishops sit in Parliament, and thus have a direct 
political influence. Again, the entire body of the 
clergy is a definite class, entitled always to be heard in 
a society which rests on a basis of class and is itself 
only a federation of many class-interests. This priestly 
class, in its highest rank too, reaches into the peerage. 
It requires a personal knowledge of English life tc 
know how much this means. 

Once more, the English clergy have a better and 
happier education than the main body of ours, which, 



188 LONDON. 

indeed, they share with the leaders of thought of all 
England, but it works out special advantages in their 
profession. Owing to a greater breadth of learning, 
and as its resultant a larger freedom of thought and ex- 
pression, many of the great intellectual and social ques- 
tions which are fought outside of the Church with us 
are fought inside of it here. Then the good fortune of 
a university education in England is a great blessing 
which widens with the years. All the best life of Eng- 
land goes to school either at Cambridge or Oxford. 
Until more recent years this has been the case almost 
without exception. The graduates of these two univer- 
sities divided among themselves all England, and have 
done so for hundreds of years. Their alumni have 
been simply a club formed of the leaders in the state, 
in the Church, in society, in the army, at the bar. 
England is a small place,, where men constantly meet 
one another. The young university clergyman starts 
with an acquaintance embracing all that is best in the 
kingdom, and that will last for life if he is w^orthy of 
it. He has, therefore, a much more intimate associa- 
tion wdth the whole life of the nation than the American 
clergyman, who starts from the first in the seclusion of 
a denominational college and further segregates himself 
by finishing his education in an admittedly sectarian 
theological school. 

Finally, the Established Church itself is an alliance 
with the politics and good society of the kingdom, and 
its leaders have necessarily intimate relations with and 
responsibilities to these interests. 

There is another solid reason why the clergy of Lon- 
don should stand to the front of their calling. All 
England is behind them. The men who preach in St. 
PauFs and Westminster, at Smithfield or the Temple, 
and who live at Lambeth Palace, would be less than 
mortal did they not draw strength and inspiration from 
the historic theatre of their work. 



THE PLAY AND THE THEATRE. 189 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE PLAY AND THE THEATRE. 

The Primitive Inn-Yard Stage of Old England — • 
Disappearance of the English Drama of the Soil — • 
The Saxon Play and the Modern Theatre — London 
Theatres and Law-Court Kooms — Hknry Irving at 
THE Lyceum — The Sceptre of Eashion — Sara Bern- 
hardt over from the Theatre Fran^ais. 

Several ancient London inns, with spacious interior 
court-yards surrounded with galleries in the shape of a 
continuous porch running around the second story, are 
still pointed out as the rude and simple play-houses of 
Old England. The stage here was the pavement of 
the court-yard. The spectators gathered on the upper 
porches, or perhaps could even sit at their chamber 
windows and see and hear the play, as I have done this 
year in a provincial Italian town, and seen good acting. 
The servants of the inn and hangers-on clustered in the 
corners of the court-yard, standing on the ground, or 
maybe indulging in the kitchen-stools and stable- 
benches. It is, perhaps, in survival of this tradition that 
in most of the London theatres of to-day the best part 
of the house is called the pit, and that seats in it are 
sold at a cheap price and fashion rigorously shuns it. 
The modern pit is the survivor of the old inn court- 
yard, and the flavor of the stable and kitchen still 
clings to it. Many of the plays of Shakespeare were 
brought before the people on just such simple boards, some 
of them in some of these very inns. This was in the days 
of Merrie England and of strolling players, — the time 
when England was a })lay-going nation. She was then 
Catholic and monarchical in heart. To-day she is 



190 LONDON. 

Protestant and republican, and her native drama is 
gone. 

There is something in democracy and Puritanism 
which drives the theatre out of a national life. The 
people have risen to higher interests. When the Puritan 
became ascendant in England he closed up the play- 
houses, burnt the plays, branded the poor players, and, 
perhaps, drove them with cropped ears out of the land. 
They have never come back. England has her theatres 
to-day, but they are no more an institution of the people. 
They are simply a conventional amusement of the higher 
classes common to the world. They flourish only in her 
cities. The '^ play'^ of English literature has disap- 
peared. 

A popular love of the drama among the humble 
body of the people only exists in that condition of civi- 
lization where there is a high development of the dra- 
matic element in Church and State. Wherever there 
are elaborate rites and forms in the Church, and scenic 
displays in the Government, there the heart of the 
common people is really moved by its drama, which, 
howev^er humble it may be, answers to and satisfies a 
popular craving. A drama of the soil flourishes best 
wlien the High-Church principle rules in the Church 
and the monarchical principle in the State. In Italy 
to-day, where the people are born actors, the daily ser- 
vice of the Church is always an impressive picture, and 
it flowers all the time in imposing "functions" in 
grand cathedrals so built that the chancel railings 
enclose a mao^nificent sta":e where a hundred or more 
})riests and acolytes can countermarch, intone, swing 
censers, and group themselves in effective tableaux. 
From the England of the play and play-houses come 
down scenic coronations and spectacular openings of Par- 
liament, which are performed yet to-day, but to irre- 
sponsive audiences. The whole order of life of the peer- 
age is, in fact, a colossal play for the amusement and 
impression of the common people. When the people 



THE PLAY AND THE THEATRE. 191 

get behind the scenes then comes democracy. Democ- 
racy has come for England, and the drama as a native 
institution has disappeared before it. The old name, 
even, is gone. The Saxon ^' play" of the people has 
given way to the Latin theatrum of fashion. The 
English theatre of to-day does not differ from the 
American. Tlie same plays are acted in the same way, 
and the same kind of people go to hear them, — viz., 
the well-off world of fashion and the very dregs of 
the cities. The vast body of the people have no more 
interest in them than have onrs. 

The theatres of I^ondon, therefore, although good in 
their several ways, offer no field for the study of Eng- 
lish life except incidentally. The houses themselves 
were not materially different from ours, and they 
seemed to grade themselves fashionable, middle class, 
low, much a.s ours do. 

In this similarity to ours they resemble every other in- 
stitution whose development in England and our country 
has been under similar conditions. I took a stroll one 
day through the law-courts of London under a barrister^s 
guidance, and was surprised to find how little they dif- 
fered from ours. Even the men in them were the same. 
There was the little, withered-up, old lawyer, the portly, 
substantial, prosperous one, the hurried, fuU-of-busi- 
ness advocate, the hungry, shabby attorney, who has 
given up the race, and haunts the court-room by 
habit; the judge who tried the case himself, and did 
all the talking; the judge whose docket was always 
behindhand ; the barrister with unclean linen and un- 
brushed clothes. They were all there just as they are 
sitting in the court-rooms of Pennsylvania to-day. It 
may be that Pennsylvania, accepting the common law 
in full and the old English system of pleading, and 
changing very little of anything until within this gen- 
eration, has carried down somethino- more of the detail 
of the English court-room than other States, but it is 
not much. The controlling reason for the likeness is 



192 LONDON. 

that for three hundred years the law, always a con- 
servative profession, has advanced with equal steps 
and under nearly eqnal conditions in England and this 
country. The American lawyer has added to his pro- 
fessional labors the burden of politics, which, in Eng- 
land, has been generally shouldered by another class, 
but that is abont all the difference in their lives. He 
threw away the wig, also, and that is about all the 
difference there is in the coup cVceil of an English 
and American court-room. And that is a difference 
to our advantage. I failed entirely to see the dignity 
and impressiveness which, to the English mind, lies in 
a horse-hair wig. They give a slovenly and unclean air 
to a whole room. Few were well kept, none of them 
looked fresh, and many were nasty. 

All theatre-going London, in 1879, was divided in 
its worship of Henry Irving and Sara Bernhardt, both 
of whom are promised to America, and both of whom 
have made conquest of the world of fashion as well as 
of the stage. 

Henry Irving has unquestionably achieved a wonder- 
ful success in holding the sustained attention of Lon- 
don. His plays are mostly of a high order,— mainly 
Shakespearian. His Merchant of Venice has held the 
stage for hundreds of nights, and there are no symptoms 
to show that the interest is flagging. One must go a 
week beforehand to secure seats, and this has been the 
case for several years. His theatre is the Lyceum, — 
on classic ground just off the Strand. Mr. Irving is a 
spare, rather fine-looking man, with an intellectual face 
and the carriage of a gentleman. He has the sem- 
blance of a bend in his shoulders greater than the 
reality. When acting you see Henry Irving all the time, 
but it is not offensive. He blends with his character, 
but he never loses himself even to the incidents of 
his appearance. There is, for instance, a certain melo- 
dramatic air about him, recognizable plainly in his 



THE FLAY AND THE THEATRE. I93 

photographs^ which never forsakes him and leaves on 
one a suspicion that he is forever posing. He wears a 
"melancholy mien/^ as one who carries around from 
hour to hour the burden of a great grief, a secret 
mystery, perhaps even a delicious crime. This manner, 
however, is one of chaste repression, and the highest 
finish of subdued refinement. There is not the least 
suggestion of the possibility of a scene or of anything that 
might violate the minutest conventionalities of good 
society. It is an air eminently calculated to charm and 
interest a sympathetic woman with time on her hands 
and plenty of money. 

This charm Mr. Irving has worked, and it is the 
danger which confronts him now in coming to our 
country. Although an excellent, conscientious, and 
scholarly actor, INIr. Irving owes his sovereignty of the 
London stage to the stamp of aristocratic endorsement 
set on him personally. Society, in a country where 
society is thoroughly organized, has approved him. It 
has taken him up, it has opened its drawing-rooms to 
him, it has made it the mode to go to the Lyceum. 
Bishops hear him, the clergy of good society discuss 
him with religieuse peeresses; the journal with social 
ambition hymns his praises. It is very meet and right 
and proper now in England to hear Henry Irving. 

Now in this country we have nothing at all to answer 
to the direct and powerful influence of the English 
aristocracy in general society. It can take up a pet of 
any kind, for a mere whim, perhaps, and his fortune is 
made. And it does take up these pets all the time, and 
in the most capricious way. Sometimes it is an actor, 
sometimes it is a clergyman, sometimes it is an artist, 
sometimes it is a beauty, sometimes even the whim may 
be to buy at a certain shop or patronize a certain trades- 
man. Whatever it is, the success of the pet is assured. 
All London kneels at the feet of the beauty, throngs the 
theatre of the actor, buys the pictures of the artist, or 
crowds the shop of the favorite tradesman. Perhaps 
in 17 



194 LONDON. 

society even tolerates or half invites a mild and cautious 
snubbini^ from its pet. This is the perilous position of 
Henry Irving. He is the pet of London society, and 
specially of that wing of it which affects to be non- 
worldly. He stands at the head of the English stage, 
but how far he owes that position to an arbitrary degree 
of fashion, and liow far to a genuine mastery of his 
profession, it may take the verdict of an American pub- 
lic to decide. 

When Sara Bernhardt first comes on the stage you 
see a meagre-looking, rather impassive soubrette, with a 
plain thin face and a body that looks like an unin- 
teresting fabrication of w^halebones and corsets. You 
are looking anxiously at every entrance for the great 
actress to make her appearance, when it breaks on you 
with a disappointment that this inferior young woman 
is she herself. It can hardly be, it cannot possibly be, 
but a moment or two and the inexorable caste decides. 
Yes, it is she, certainly. Soon the " divine skeleton^' 
begins to breathe, the eyes of the soul light up the 
sunken face, and the worn body clothes itself with flesh 
and grace. 

There can be no question as to the Bernhardt's right 
to her throne. Disendowed with a body carrying which 
many a rustic girl would give up the village race, she 
has placed herself at the head of the actresses of her 
day, flooded the capitals of two continents with her 
face, and dictated the mode in dress and adornment of 
the civilized world. And this resistless power of hers 
which holds London and Paris at her feet, and sends 
her fame wherever there is Avritten language, is the 
more strange that it is so purely intellectual. With none 
of the sensuous charms of physical attraction, she has 
nevertheless always made men the slaves of her body. 
On the stage it is the passion of the soul which achieves 
her triumphs. You see forever the fiery mind flaming 
through the frail body. Her power is that wondrous 



THE PLAY AND THE THEATRE. 195 

Hebrew force in civilization which flashes out all 
throuo;h history, and which in onr own day we confess 
in a Disraeli, a Gambetta, a Rothschild, and a Rachel. 
Almost any woman with Sara Bernhardt's body would 
look like a faded little seamstress all her life and feel 
like one. She has set that body on a throne and made 
all the women in Christendom do homage to it. The 
experienced modern eye will see modes of dress and 
little achievements of feminine embellishment in every 
town of the United States, which were conceived and 
brought forth solely to rectify certain lines in Miss 
Bernhardt's physical frame or to draw off attention 
from certain others that would not be successfully recti- 
fied. What greater triumph is open to woman than to 
thus chain her whole sex to her chariot wheels? 

When Sara Bernhardt came to London success was 
immediate and assured. The commission of the classic 
Theatre Frangais — the first stage of the world — had, 
perhaps, made this a sure thing, but nevertheless society 
undertook her cause, and made it a social necessity to 
have seen her. Under the segis'of His Royal High- 
ness the Prince of Wales the comparatively Puritanic 
drawing-rooms of London were opened, with some 
qualms it is true, to " Miss Sara Bernhardt and son," 
and Matthew Arnold in the elaborate pages of the Nine- 
teenth Century paid the compliments of the world of 
scholarship and higher letters. 

As an actress, there is no doubt of her power. Her 
very presence grows on one with a fascination he cannot 
understand. There is a finish, a consummate grace, a 
trained force in every movement and position that 
throw around her the real histrionic nimbus and estab- 
lish her divine right to the succession of the sov- 
ereignty of the stage. Her genius is a perfection of 
simulation of which, perhaps, our heavier Saxon race 
is not capable, and therefore admires the more. 

The special circles which respectively chaperoned 
Henry Irving and Sara Bernhardt represent rather 



196 LONDON. 

antipodal elements of London society, but it is all a 
matter of the upper classes. The people of England 
know nothing and care nothing for either of the stars 
that reign in the theatrical firmament. They have 
nothing to do with the London stage of our day, which 
is not English. It may be cosmopolitan, electic of the 
world, better than all England ever did or could afford, 
but it is not national. 
London. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

THE LONDON TIMES. 

In the Fortress of the Thunderer — Mechanical Plant 
AND Management of the Establishment — Presses — 
Type-Founding — Electric Light — Electrotyping-Shop — 
The Canteen — Telegraphic Service — Printing by Ear 
— Night-Work — The Paper of the Future — American 
AND English Journalism. 

Peinting-House Square, which sounds so grandly 
from across the seas, is in London so modest a place 
that one can readily pass by it unwittingly, as I did, 
even after having fixed its general locality from the 
map, and started out to find it. This, however, is not 
because " the Square'^ is an inconsiderable structure, 
but because of the magnitude of London, which is so 
immense that one only comes to a conception of it 
slowlv and by experience such as this. 

The Times building is really a massive pile of solid 
brick of fair architectural effect, which in New York or 
Philadelphia might be one of the features of the city. 
In London it is simply lost, — crowded away among 
square miles of similar structures densely packed and 
pressed together. 

Printing-House Square, the castle of the modern 



THE LONDON TIMES. 197 

Thunderer, stands on the reputed site of an old Xorman 
fortress. There is something dramatic in this coinci- 
dence which makes the spot the suggestive vignette of 
whole centuries of history, and starts a thousand poetic 
and philosophic dreams on the local correlation of 
force. 

I had had no acquaintance with The Times, but a 
note of introduction sent by kind thoughtful ness of a 
leading New York editor opened widely and hospitably 
its doors, and I spent a portion of a day most profitably 
in an exhaustive inspection of its plant and watching 
somewhat the process of its daily work. Let me tell 
of some of its wonders. 

In this letter I shall confine myself chiefly to the 
mechanical features, as being of most popular interest 
and best picturing the establishment to the non-profes- 
sional world. The editorial side is of professional 
rather than public interest, and, besides, why should the 
arcana of the profession be laid before those ej^es which 
see not ? 

I shall avoid also the familiar figures which simply 
prove a colossal business, and wdiich would be equally 
impressive in recording the results of a pork-packing or 
brick-making establishment, and attempt to briefly out- 
line some of the features which are distinctive to The 
Times and characteristic. 

Solidly established for years, founded on the strong 
bases of the University and the governing classes of 
England, conducted by men every one of whom is an 
expert and veteran in the business, The Times enjoys an 
income that now comes in of itself, and stretching out 
like some of our great railway companies, it now em- 
ploys a portion of its surplus revenues every year in 
buttressing itself, by extending its works out to the per- 
manent manufacture of its own supplies. These things 
are permanent investments, not expenses, and, although 
costly in the start, in the long course of years save 
money. 

17* 



198 LONDON. 

Let me enumerate some of the most important as 
illustrative of the sco])e of the plant. The Times — 
I. Manufactures its own presses. 
II. Founds its own type. 

III. Provides its own light — electric. 

IV. Feeds its employees on the spot. 
V. Has its own electrotyping-shop. 

VI. Has its own telegraphic service and wires — in 
the main ; and 

VII. Repair-shops for all these different machineries. 
All tliese great shops and offices are under one roof, and 

the clusterof them, with the other ordinary departments 
of a newspaper-office, — editorial-, composing-, proof-, 
stereotyping-, making-up-, press-, business-, advertising-, 
and distribution-rooms, — form The Times building:. 

The Walter presses are made here for the market as 
well as for the proprietor's own paper, and in these 
shops I found the workmen in the busy clatter of 
turning out great machines, as in any great factory or 
foundry. 

In the press-room of the paper stand eight ; six go 
every night and two stand by as a reserve brigade. 
Each press prints a whole copy of The Times, both 
sides, sixteen pages, and at the rate of twelve thousand 
per hour. The edition, therefore, goes off at the rate 
of seventy-two thousand per hour. These presses are 
ranged in three columns in an immense room on the 
first floor of the building, the enormous w^eight sup- 
ported by arches. The paper-room, another large space, 
is just below the press-room, the paper being hoisted up 
by a lift (American elevator) into the centre of the 
press-room. In the spacious paper-rooms below you 
wander through long avenues of huge rolls of paper, 
each roll four miles long. I watched at one of the 
presses the four-mile run of one of these rolls, and it 
was striking to see how quickly it was done. 

Much of the mechanical interest of The Times cen- 
tres in its type department. I brought away with me 



THE LONDON TIMES. 199 

some type made under my eye in the founding-room. 
But that is only the beginning of the wonder. Fol- 
lowing this type into another department you see it set 
by machinery. All publishers are familiar with the 
history of the long effort of Mr. Waher in this direc- 
tion. Here is tlie result : 

One-half of The Times every niglit is set by ma- 
chinery. One machine does the work of six to eight 
skilled compositors. It cannot correct, however, and 
here is its weak point, or the whole paper would be set 
with it. As it is, the work is about divided. Doubtful 
copy and all revisions are done by hand, the steady, 
regular work by machinery. 

A young man sits before what looks like a piano- 
board, with four or five banks of keys all lettered. 
He })lays on these keys with forefingers of each hand 
rapidly, and the type are as rapidly shifted into a kind 
of minute steel galley, the exact width of the body of a 
type. There is no system of fingering as with piano 
music, — only the two paws fly like lightning. 

The distributing-machine just reverses the process of 
the setting instrument, and in the last stage each letter 
of the alphabet is rapidly shunted off on to its separate 
side-track, where they stand like long trains of freight 
cars in the yard of a colossal depot. It is a wonderful 
machine, but there are others, I think, now surely ap- 
proaching perfection of nuich more interest and impor- 
tance to newspaper property. 

The last permanent investment of The Times has 
been the manufacture of its own light on the electric 
system, using carbon points. The cost for the plant of 
this has been very great, but it is so far successful, and 
the cost of now producing light is very moderate. 

The entire building is lighted by sixteen electric 
lights, each light of from eight hundred to one thousand 
candle-power, far more than is needed. Sixteen wires, 
each starting directly from a battery, are used to dis- 
tribute the light, and the battery is worked from a solid 



200 LONDON. 

and powerful steam-engine. This engine had to be 
built expressly for the electric battery, and its power 
cannot be used for any other purpose ; the light would 
waver and be unsteady. Quite thick porcelain globes 
are used to temper the fierce power of the light, and the 
dark shadows are in part corrected by reflection from 
white bowls. I see no reason why the new Edison 
light should not be attached to this plant, if desirable. 

This electric manufacture has been an advertisement 
for The Times, but so far it is not an economy. They 
have more light than they need or want to have, and the 
cost of the plant is the capital of a gas company, not a 
legitimate expense of a newspaper establishment. 

The employees of The Times are fed in the building, 
— a great saving of time to employer and employed. 
The canteen consists of a fine large kitchen and two 
dining-rooms. Food is supplied at cost rates to the 
men, — '^ everything except beer, on which is charged a 
little profit, which saves the canteen always from loss, 
and the margin of profit, whatever it may be, is always 
turned in to an employees^ relief fund which we have," 
it was explained to me. 

" That is very excellent ; but we do not call beer 
^food' in America," 

The canteen is a very good and saving institution. 
It supplies a kind of cheap club to the men, but there 
could be no better illustration of the difference of 
habits and manners on the liquor question between the 
two countries. Here was a careful and conscientious 
employer furnishing liquor to his force; and, more 
than that, long rows of bright, burnished pewter ale- 
mugs, each with ^' The Times" proudly engraved on 
its beaming face, greeted my vision as one of the em- 
bellishments of the canteen. 

The electrotyping-shop is a well-appointed room, 
equipped with all the modern appliances of the trade, 
where are made the plates for the weather diagrams 
published daily in The Times, and also maps, charts, 



THE LONDON TIMES. 201 

etc. So well is this shop perfected that a moderate- 
sized plate can be turned out in a few minutes. Prac- 
tical newspaper managers will recognize the economy 
and desirable use of this attachment. 

The Times has its own wires over much of England 
and most of the cojitinent, and its own service of them 
by accomplished correspondents, — men of ability and 
influence. It uses Renter (tlie Associated Press of 
Europe), but only partially and as an incident, its page 
or more of telegraphic news being generally exclusively 
its OW'U, and the Renter news coming in only in a supple- 
mentary way. It is a common expression among news- 
paper men in our country that we only use the telegraph 
largely. I think that the special telegraph service of 
The Times exceeds that of any American newspaper, 
saving, possibly, the New York Herald and the Chicago 
Times. It does not strike the popular and uneducated 
eye, perhaps, so strongly as ours, because it does not deal 
in criminal news, small fires, petty accidents, sensations, 
etc. ; but every morning The Times does have a de- 
spatch from every capital in Europe from a " stick" to 
a column and a half or two columns in length, giving 
the political situation of the day and the great business 
and social features, — the matter that statesmen and 
scholars and leaders read and talk about. They are 
its constituency. Its telegraphic service of special 
matter averages, I think, al)Out a page a day, and a 
page of The Times is equal in superficies to over 
twenty per cent, more than a page of the New York 
Hei'ald. 

It is all solid news, too, — no padding or whipped 
cream. 

The reception of the telegraphic news of The Times is 
something unique. The lines from the continental 
capitals, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Vienna, etc., all, of 
course, converge in one room, and the despatches are 
received over an instrument that prints. The print- 
ing, however, serves merely as a record. The despatch, 



202 LONDON. 

as it is received, is read off by the telegraph operator 
to the operator of a type-machine, who plays it off by 
ear, and the despatch, thus reduced to written form, is 
supplied to the editors in printed proof. Of course, 
only the work of responsible correspondents, likely to 
need no alteration, is honored in this way. It would 
be too expensive to treat thus matter requiring editing. 

The type-setting-machine compositors are, of course, 
a class to themselves, or, rather, to The Times. Every 
ordinary compositor going on The Times obligates him- 
self to abandon all Unions or outside organizations. 

Indeed, in many things the office is exclusive in this 
way. It does not employ men who serve on other 
papers, and those who work on The Times are pro- 
tected in many ways from outside affiliations. As a 
curious instance of this feeling, I was shown, in a 
distant portion of the building, a rather desolate, 
cheerless-looking room for casual employees or tem- 
porary contributors, " persons that we don't want to 
mix up with our own men, you know." 

But all this costly mechanical plant did not make 
The Times. It was before all these things were, which 
are but its menial equipment. The being of The Times 
is in the brain-power and character of its founder and 
directors. It is a power and an authority and an in- 
fluence because of their strength and social force. So 
high is the personal character of the direction of this 
paper, so judicial and scholarly its editing, so careful 
and judicious its expression, that it has, at home and 
abroad, all the responsibility, standing, and influence 
of a living and responsible man. It has, in fact, the 
social position, political weight, and personal, character 
of the best-born, best-educated, and highest-minded 
man in Britain, and in its circulation, therefore, has 
just the association, relations, and influence which such 
a man would have. And it has all this and keeps it 
just because it is owned and edited by just this class 
of men. 



THE LONDON TIMES. 203 

A marked feature of the place is the large amount 
of hard work and unremitting attention bestowed un- 
ceasingly on The Times by its proprietors and editors. 

Here is an old paper, perhaps the best established in 
the world. Every man on it holding any responsible 
position is an expert in the business. The experience 
of some of them is hereditary. Every employee on the 
paper is of the highest grade of scholarship or business 
training, but the managers and editor are working as 
hard and closely as if they were starting a new enter- 
prise. Let me give some facts : 

All the editorial work is done at night, the editors 
not coming down at all in the daytime. 

Mr. Chenery, the editor, sees the first paper off the 
press every night. 

Mr. McDonald, the managing publisher, sees the 
whole edition off the press every night. 

The paper goes to press at 3.30 a.m., but these men 
know that from midnight to 3 A.M. is the quarter-deck 
in action of a morning paper, and they are on it. Mr. 
Walter's (the main proprietor's) own house is adjoining 
and runs into The Times building ; is substantially a 
part of it. The dwelling of Mr. Delane, the late 
editor, stood quite near the office, between Printing- 
House Square and The Temple. He, too, always was 
on deck at night until the paper went down. Both of 
their dwellings are far down town ; infinitely farther 
from the social life and rest of London than w^ould be 
Third and Chestnut from that of Philadelphia. But 
the night is the life of a morning paper. 

The Times having no long railway routes to travel, as 
all England is covered in a few hours, and running off 
its edition at the speed of seventy-two thousand an hour, 
can afford to wait until a later moment before going to 
press tlian a paper of Philadelphia or New York. I may 
say here, the editors of all kinds each hav^e a room to 
themselves, and work under all the advantages of seclu- 
sion and silence. These rooms, nearly every one of 



204 LONDON. 

which I visited, are spacious, often about sixteen by 
sixteen or twenty feet, and substantially furnished, 
have high ceilings, are well ventilated and comfortably 
lighted. They have, in fact, something of the com- 
fortable air of a university chamber. 

Another marked feature is the watchful economy 
practised in the daily management. While all the first- 
cost or investment expenses have been on the most lib- 
eral and solid scale, the daily running expenses are very 
closely guarded. The story of the rags in The Times 
composing-room, I suppose, is familiar to all interested 
in the newspaper business, but I saw other things quite 
as remarkable. For instance, I saw in a comparatively 
small package the entire waste paper of the previous 
day's seventy thousand edition of The Times, — i.e., the 
sheets of defective paper or paper spoiled on the press, — 
and it was not as large as often is the waste of a Phila- 
delj^hia paper. Per contra, it is to be said the paper is 
of better quality and less likely to tear or break. The 
same economy — the child of thorough knowledge of 
the business — ran through every department of the es- 
tablishment, editorial and manufacturing. There was 
no waste, no splashing, and close saving. The cost of 
specials and of travelling expenses is much better worked 
down than with us, — indeed, this is so on all English 
papers. The composing-room is closely watched, — no 
union rules, of course, interfering. Repeat advertise- 
ments are not distributed and reset as in one of our 
American newspapers, but held as long as the type re- 
mains in good order. When I mentioned the custom 
of a New York journal on this point to The Times 
manager, he w^as unaffectedly astonished, exclaiming, 
Oest magnifique mais ce 71* est pas la guerre. 

The distinguishing characteristic of The Times is 
solidity. 

The editorial department, like everything else of in- 
fluence and weight in England, rests squarely on the 
university, and what that means it takes some insight 



THE LONDON TIMES. 205 

into the English life to understand. The paper ad- 
dresses the leaders and thinkers and statesmen of the 
world, and it must have the best trained power to speak 
to them. 

The solid paper that it is printed on is equal to book 
paper in grade. Three of the sixteen-paged numbers 
of The Times go to the pound of printing-paper. 

The proof-reading is perfection, — more scholarly and 
faultless than that of the average American book. 

Of the solidity of the manufacturing plant this letter 
has amply spoken. 

But while everything is solid and perfected on The 
Tunes, while every man on it is trained and tried in his 
profession and there is no experimenting in the business 
of the establishment, there is no cessation of mental 
energies or invention, for these men are veterans, stand- 
ing ready to hold their paper abreast of the times and 
to seize first the vantage-ground of any new discoveries 
that might aifect the property or the new^spaper life. 
The Times, indeed, has always been a college of inven- 
tion and discovery in the newspaper workl, spending 
large sums of money in reaching after new processes 
and improvements in machinery or management. 
Among the achieved results of its labors in this way 
are the Walter press and the type-setting machine,— two 
endurino: monuments. I was rather startled to find in 
this connection that among the problems revolving in 
the fecund womb of The Times office was one to which 
I have for several years given a good deal of thought 
and some practical labor, — viz., the publication simul- 
taneously of a great daily paper in a dozen cities. That 
is certainly the newspaper of the future, and the future 
may be near at hand. 

There is no excitement or nervous hurry in The Times 
building, — nothing, perhaps, that would impress an un- 
skilled visitor, — but the mental atmosphere is very 
stimulating. In fact, one feels tired and, exhausted — 
that familiar experience of our Centennial Exposition 

18 



206 LONDON. 

— after inspecting honestly its plant and workings, so 
great are the achieved results, so limitless the range of 
the thousand suggestions which start themselves in re- 
viewing in the sympathetic companionship of its own 
management the first newspaper office of the world. 

In such a visit one's mind constantly tends to run- 
ning a parallel between the English journal and the 
American, but such a contrast is fair to neither, and 
very illusive. In the first place, the functions or uses 
of the two papers are very different. As 7iew7spa[>ers 
we undoubtedly excel ; but the English papers do the 
thinking for their communities in a way that our jour- 
nals do not, and, as a consequence, their conductors 
have a higher influence and stronger standing in so- 
ciety. Then, the English idea of *' news" is something 
very diflerent from ours, and the Continental concep- 
tion is something different again from either. And 
the English journals, like English society, are divided 
by classes between which there is a wide gulf such as 
does not exist with us. The leading papers are very 
strong, dignified, scholarly, and powerful ; the lower 
papers are very low, and the classes do not grade into 
each other by insensible shades as with us. 

In fact, the papers of a country are the outcome and 
development of its life. What that is they will be. 
A comparative study of the great papers of the world, 
say The Times of England, Independence Beige of Brus- 
sels, Gblos of St. Petersburg, Figaro of Paris, and 
others of like representative character, will lead one 
more and more to this conclusion just as far as he gets 
a real insight to the representative journals themselves, 
their editorial direction and work, the character of their 
news and the methods of its presentation, and, finally, 
the reception and support of the journals by their re- 
spective communities. 

London. 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 207 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

HISTORIC TAVERNS, 

In the Haunts of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson — The 
English Inn — The Tavern Clubs of the Seventeenth 
AND Eighteenth Centuries — The Somerset Tavern and 
THE Junius Letters — The Kainbow Coffee-House — 
Doctor Johnson and the Mitre — The Cheshire Cheese 
— The Cock — History and Politics in the Inn Names 
OF England. 

All through English literature there come down to 
us certain names of homelike London inns, which, 
although familiar by their oft recurrence and the flood 
of associations which sweep through them, — the memo- 
ries and recollections of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, 
of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, Dean Swift, Pope, Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, Gibbon, bluff old Dr. Johnson, Bos- 
well, Pepys, and a host of worthies, — are yet mostly 
thought of by us only as pictures, as something utterly 
gone and passed away, like the silent forum or the des- 
olated mansions of Macsenas. 

It is, therefore, a pleasant surprise to find many of 
them here in the flesh, and they are quite worth visit- 
ing and picturing, as in addition to their intrinsic 
interest their existence to-day is thoroughly illustrative 
of an inside phase of English life. Many of these his- 
toric taverns exist now almost exactly as they did in 
the days of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith, less changed 
in their outward appearance than would be the doctor 
or the deathless " Vicar'' if living now, while in their 
inner life and traditions they are essentially the same as 
a century or more ago. 

The English tavern never dies. Landlords may 
come and go, servants grow venerable and pass into 
local traditions, barmaids bloom and fade into but 



208 LONDON. 

toasts and memories, but " the inn'' goes on forever. 
Heirlooms accumulate on its time-stained walls ; corners 
and seats grow famous as the men who once claimed 
them reveal themselves in history ; the genii loci gather 
with the centuries ; but the inn is fresh and young and 
warm and cheery forever. I have already mentioned 
that at Stratford-on-Avon an inn at which Washington 
Irving rested in 1830, I think, and mentioned in liis 
published letters, still lives on his genial recommenda- 
tion and deserves it. At Waltham I found an excel- 
lent country inn reputed through the kingdom, which 
dates from A.D. 1260, an undoubted case of Bonifacial 
succession. The Four Swans blazons to-day this ancient 
date on its quaint signboard, and confidently appeals to 
a respectable ancestry of six centuries as its best claim 
to the patronage of the travellers of 1880-1900. 

So it is with the London taverns of literature. Some 
of them, it is true, have yielded up the ghost under 
the inexorable hand of Time, demolished by Boards 
of Public Improvement, or reconstructed into gilded 
modern meaninglessness by vulgar enterprise, but many 
of them yet live, respectable just as they were respect- 
able of yore, and sober and responsible, with the charac- 
ter of centuries to maintain. " The Somerset Tavern," 
the "Cheshire Cheese," the "Rainbow," the "Mitre," 
and the " Cock," every one of which is grandly illus- 
trated in English literature and history, are all here yet, 
living and moving and having their being in the daily 
life of this our nineteenth century, but bringing down 
to us in hourly detail something of the daily life of the 
England of two hundred years ago, and perhaps more. 

All of these that I have mentioned are found in Fleet 
Street and along the Strand, and quite near together. 
They all stand now, however, off the street in courts, or 
what were once courts, and are reached either through 
dark archways or by extremely narrow and modest 
little alleys wdiich a stranger would readily pass un- 
noticed. Consequently, they are saved from the pro- 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 209 

fanatlon of vulgar and ignorant custom. The customers 
of these inns have mostly come to them by inheritance 
or congenial introduction. These courts were likely at 
first gardens, such as stand around the country inn now 
in most villages. In time, as the town choked the 
fields, they were built up close around to the very 
palings of the little garden ; the roses and pansies and 
marigolds gave way to flagstones and solid pavement, 
and the hard-stone court was thus developed, — the evo- 
lution of the city. Carpenters' Court in Philadelphia, 
inclosing the Carpenters' Hall, where the initial Conti- 
nental Congress sat, is a good American illustration of 
these still old English courts. 

The Somerset Tavern stands out clear in the memory 
of everv student of constitutional law and Eno-lish his- 
tory. Through the humble hands of its barmaid passed 
the MSS. of the famous Junius Letters before they 
saw the light of print. , This seems to us a very in- 
secure and fortuitous mode of communication, but it is a 
thoroughly traditional English one, and is yet largely 
used. At many an English inn I have seen stuck in 
a glass behind the bar or placed upright against the 
shelf or decanter on the sideboard broad, square letters 
addressed in the modern conventional English hand to 
*^ Mr. Harry Chauncey," or "William Henry Howard, 
Esqre.," frequenters of the hostelry, who get their home 
letters here just as their fathers did in the seventeenth 
century. This unconventional post-office is generally 
in charge of the barmaid, who is, in fact, an institution 
of the place, and the " next friend" of everybody who 
comes about it. 

The MSS. of the Junius Letters were left at this 
Somerset Tavern, addressed to *^ Mr. AVoodfall, 
printer," who probably ate his midday meal or spent 
his evenings here. His shop, still here, is about three 
minutes' walk from the tavern and behind it. It is 
now as then a printing-office, and the name boldly 
o 18^ 



210 LONDON. 

painted on the wall is the same,- — Woodfall. The letters 
were left at the tavern by a boy. 

As a picture this inn is the least interesting of those 
mentioned. The old house is the same, but it has been 
remodelled tliroughout within, after the style of a 
modern hotel, and a drin king-saloon of the ordinary 
pattern pushed out so as to give a street entrance. 
Historically it is a mere shell. The old ^^ interior'^ 
and the charm of the old life are both gone. 

" The Rainbow," No. 15 Fleet Street, is consecrated 
with the elusive memories of Shakespeare. Here, too, 
it is said, came Ben Jonson and Beaumont and 
Fletcher and Donne, and flashed wit and jest and story 
with the London actors of that long-ago day. The 
Rainbow, in early history, stood probably in a garden 
between the Thames and the Strand. The garden pos- 
sibly became a court ; but if so, now the court — gone 
after the garden — is built solidly over, and the Rain- 
bow, away off the street and enveloped in a solid mass 
of building, is reached by a long and very narrow pas- 
sage — a mere right of way — which opens on Fleet 
Street almost un perceived. 

The Rainbow has kept pace with the times, carefully 
preserving the old features of the place, the old charac- 
teristics, and the old life. The comfortable building is 
the same. The old-fashioned bar is still there with 
the little office, — for the Rainbow was and is a spacious 
hostelry, — the two together presided over still by that 
remarkable young woman who, in the English inn or 
hotel of average size, does civilly and agreeably and 
thoroughly the duties of three conspicuous American 
officials, — the hotel-clerk, the barkeeper, and the book- 
keeper and cashier. The pleasant fire in the open 
chimney-place and i\\Q shining pewter are still there. 
The perfect but unpretentious service is the same which 
Englishmen shared with you two hundred years ago. 
The heavy spotless linen, the clear-cut glass, are prob- 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 211 

ably of our own day. Here you get a good modern 
London dinner, based, however, on the old English 
tradition of two or three plain courses. The wines are 
traditionally known and excellent, — solid in body and 
in price. Old usages, too, are as far as possible scru- 
pulously observed. Your haunch of mutton or great 
roast of beef is wheeled up to your table and your cut 
taken off in your presence and under your own direction 
if you are particular. The custom of this place, as I 
saw it, was of a high and most reputable kind, solid 
bankers, merchants, and lawyers, apparently doing busi- 
ness in that locality, — the same class of men who for 
two hundred years have been using it in midday and 
afternoon. In the evening there is probably more 
smoke and wine and clinking glasses. 

The Rainbow has a further and better-authenticated 
historical interest as having been a " coifee-house," a 
younger institution in English history than the tavern, 
and one that passed at once and largely into literature. 
The first house opened in London for the drinking of 
this new beverage was in 1650, the second was in 1652, 
and was the Rainbow. It figures as a fashionable resort 
in tlie Spectator. The drinking of coffee instead of ale or 
canary was considered rather a swell thing when it was 
first introduced. It was decried by the common people 
as effeminate, an affectation of fashion, and a sign of 
degeneracy on the part of Englishmen, and the coffee- 
houses were denounced by the lower classes, and looked 
on very much as our most exclusive club-houses are 
now. 

Previously to the opening of the coffee-house the 
Rainbow seems to have been a book-stand. " At the 
Signe of the Rainbow in Fleete Streat, near the Inner 
Temple," is an imprint of the early part of the sev- 
enteenth century. It is probable that it was in this 
connection its name became linked with those of Shake- 
speare and Ben Jonson. 

The Rainbow is an excellent hostelry of this day, as 



212 LONDON. 

well as of two hundred years ago, and the American 
traveller who delights in clothing himself with the 
wealth of the associations of the past as he travels will 
serve himself well by putting np here, if he chooses 
this locality of the town, instead of at the common run 
of hotels advertised in the guides and time-tables. He 
will be thoroughly comfortable and well fed, and will 
see at once an English " interior/' He will be inside 
of a real old English inn, not merely honeycombed in 
a cell of a mammoth modern caravansary. 

The Mitre lives in tradition as the special haunt of 
Dr. Samnel Johnson and the brilliant group that clus- 
ters around his rude, strong person as its central figure, 
— Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Boswell, — and I suppose 
it was, for you can see at once the reason of it being 
chosen as a stated rendezvous. It was a case of natu- 
ral selection. Goldsmith lived immediately back, in 
Mitre court; Dr. Johnson just across the way, in Bolt 
court ; while Burke had his chambers in the contiguous 
" Temple/' and, I presume, Boswell, too. From the 
central point of " The Mitre" they could all stagger 
home at midnight, covering the least possible distance, 
and with comparative safety. Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
who perhaps joined them sometimes, on more formal 
occasions, — for he moved more generally in a society in 
which Johnson did not go, — lived quite near, first in 
St. Martin's Lane, and then in Leicester Square, then a 
very fashionable neighborhood. 

The Mitre Tavern is found somewhat ofP Fleet Street, 
in Mitre court, a quiet, retired little recess or eddy. In 
front rolls down from the Strand the troubled current of 
London life, in the rear the busy waters of the Thames, 
but the Mitre is as still as a cloister. The suddenness 
with which in a few feet one can turn, in London, 
from the surging roar of the noisy, driven streets into 
absolute stillness is one of the dramatic surprises of 
the city. Oliver Goldsmith's grave, close by the fa- 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 213 

mous Norman Round Temple, the altar of the old cru- 
sading knights, lies only a few hundred yards from his 
homely tavern, in the hush of a country churchyard. 
Shut your eyes, and you would almost fancy the fra- 
grance of the fresh grass and English herbs and expect 
to hear the birds sing. You look around you and see 
not a green blade or tiny flower or a solitary spot where 
one might spring, — nothing but stone and crumbling 
effigies and tottering buttresses and high gray walls. 
Again, out of the thronging precinct of Westminster, 
throbbing with the pulses of the Parliament of an em- 
pire; you pass in a few steps into the peaceful cloisters 
of the Abbey and plunge at once into the Middle Ages. 
And so the close of St. PauFs and dozens of places. 

In a part of the spacious building, by the way, shut- 
ting ofP the Mitre court from Fleet Street, but fronting 
on it, and known as the Mitre property, are found the 
London offices of the New York Herald, an historical 
succession worthy of being noted as something more 
than a passing coincidence. As the representative of 
the most advanced journalism of the time, The Herald 
is the legitimate successor of The Bamhler, Spectator, 
and the Idler, and occupies, with something of right, 
the abandoned tribune of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

In the interior of the Mitre, which evidently stands 
now much as it did a century ago, you can readily trace 
the outline of the scenes which passing allusions in 
literature and tradition have made so famous, — the 
dimly-lighted room dedicated by long pre-emption to 
private uses, the smoke-laden atmosphere, the brandy 
and hot water, the white-clay pipes and t-obacco, the 
MSS. and current pamphlets, and the long table from 
whose head, night after night, the stout old Bohemian 
Tory preached ponderous philosophy, or railed at the 
Scotch and hurled angry invective against the American 
traitors making history at Philadelphia and Lexington. 
A bronze bust of Dr. Johnson fills a niche above the 
spot where his chair familiarly stood, and placidly re- 



214 LONDON. 

gards to-day those nineteenth-century customers of the 
Mitre who have curiosity or influence enough to find 
their way into the little back bar-room, which is the 
arcanum of the house. 

It is fair to say that there are several other Mitre 
taverns in London which claim the honors and prestige 
of those distinguished literary connections, but the 
weiiJ:ht of evidence and the argument from localities 
incline to the one I am describing, and whose cheer I 
have tested. 

Contemporary authority of the best kind fixes the 
Mitre Tavern of Mitre court. Fleet Street, as the site 
of the traditional Jolinsonian symposia. I have no 
doubt, however, that if the other claimant taverns were 
in existence at that time Dr. Johnson and his friends 
gave them a visit. 

^' The Cheshire Cheese,^' another favorite haunt of 
Dr. Johnson, well known in history and literature, is 
perhaps the most unchanged of all these taverns, and 
gives one the best idea of the life of those old times. 
It is very plain, and all the marked features of the old 
style are preserved with fidelity. In fact, it is not 
preservation, but continuance. I sipped some canary 
here for a half-hour one night with a friend distin- 
guished in journalism and politics and deeply versed 
in the scholarship of English literature, and spent 
some time watching the custom and incident of the 
evening, and I am sure that our eyes beheld the very 
same sights and objects which of old met the vision of 
Burke and Goldsmith and Garrick, — the same men 
and the same things. It stands in Wine-Office court, 
just across the street and nearly opposite to Mitre 
court. 

One-half of the large room is fitted up with plain, 
l)are, wooden tables of the simplest kind of construc- 
tion, that would seat four to six persons. Each table 
stands in a kind of stall, formed by the high, upright 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 215 

backs of the straight, hard, uncovered seats. The whole 
looks like the great wooden pews in our old-fashioned 
churches. The seats are about as uncomfortable as 
tliey can be, but the English — as their Parliament 
House and the church pew (their evolution) attest — 
have little idea of the luxury of rest. A large open 
space of sanded floor, with arm-chairs and a small table 
or two of freer ])osition, complete the room. An open 
chimney-place, with a burning grate, on which fizzled 
away a kettle of boiling water, gave a cosey and domes- 
tic air to the room. At the right-hand corner of this 
fireplace stood tiie chair of Dr. Johnson. Long white 
earthen pipes, fresh, and some pouches, evidently private, 
of tobacco, lay on the mantel-shelf. Two good but 
somewhat smoke-discolored oil paintings of old ser- 
vants of the inn hung on the walls. Their legend 
recited that they were contributed as a mark of respect 
by gentlemen who frequented the inn, and they were 
dedicated as special heirlooms to pass with the tavern 
property. 

The Cheshire, contrasted with its famous fellows, is 
" poor but respectable." Everything was extremely 
plain, simple^ and almost coarse, but all was neat, 
clean, and honest; the quality both of food and wines 
good for the cost. In this it is, as it has been probably 
for centuries, thoroughly solid and English. The 
cheaper inn in England is not a mere dirty and pre- 
tentious imitation of a higher class of house. It has 
its own character and is proud of it, and as far as it 
goes is solid, good, and honest; and, as a rule, this 
holds good with other English things than inns, and 
also with the people. 

It was from this tavern one day, when Goldsmith 
was confined in it by the landlady for his score, and 
watched by a bailiff outside the door, that Dr. Johnson 
went out and sold a MS. for him for sixty pounds. 
The MS. was the "Vicar of Wakefield." . ' 

" The Cock," 201 Fleet Street, a tavern of the same 



216 LONDON. 

age and general character and uses as the Rainbow or 
the Mitre, has more modern associations, its sponsor 
in literature and chiefest treasure being Alfred Ten- 
nyson, — 

" O plump head- waiter of the Cock !" 

The plump head-waiter is still living and on duty, 
and the junior bar of London assure you that the best 
" bitter" in the town is to be had in this most reputa- 
ble hostelry, which bears a diploma from the Poet 
Laureate, — 

"To each his perfect pint of stout." 

You sit in old-fashioned stalls, as at the Cheshire 
Cheese, — the floors are wooden and uncovered, as at 
all these taverns,^= — your quarters arg rather contracted, 
but your company eminently respectable. There is 
some old oak carving over the mantel- piece, and the 
whole interior is said to be unaltered from the time 
of James the First. The Cock is nearly opposite the 
Rainbow, and, like it, imbedded in a conglomerate 
mass of masonry, representing the resistless encroach- 
ments of centuries, and you reach it now only by an 
inconspicuous alley-way. It is now, too, a retreat. It 
was to the Cock that Pepys was wont to take Mistress 
Knipp and give her little dinners, much to the distress 
of his wife. " Thence to the Cock Alehouse and drank 
and eat a lobster, and mightily merry f it was a Mis- 
tress Pierce this time, and Pepys faithfully relates the 
domestic explanations which were necessary to explain 
these tavern outings, to which he was apparently fonder 
of treating his neighbors' wives than his own. 

The Whyte Harte, where Jack Cade's peasant army 
disbanded, and in whose court-yard Shakespeare's plays 
were probably acted, is still an extant house. It was 
burned down in 1676, but was rebuilt in the old style, 
wooden balconies and all. It was from these interior 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 217 

wooden balconies that the frequenters of the inn watched 
the open-air performance below on the rude flag-stoned 
pavement of the court-yard. It was a rude stage, but 
a common one, in the simple fashion of those days. 

George's Coffee-house, at 213 Fleet Street, was fre- 
quented by Shenstone, *^ who found his warmest wel- 
come at an inn.'' 

The dead centuries take form and flesh and color 
and grow wonderfully near as you sit in one of these 
old hostelries and see the life of London flowing through 
it very much just as it flowed a hundred years ago, — 
the same walls, the same furniture, the same cheer, the 
same order and service, and much the same manner of 
men. 

It is a little difficult for us to understand in our day 
the conspicuous part the tavern played in the lives of 
men whose names now sound so grandly, and whose 
forms, swelling to historic proportions, are so imposing. 
We must bear in mind, however, a number of things. 
Life was certainly somewhat ruder than it is now, and, 
again, the inn of those days was relatively higher than 
it is now. It was certainly much higher than our 
American conception of a country tavern, which, with 
its " bar-room" and noise, has nothing in common with 
the quiet, home-like English inn of to-day, — the inn 
of Shenstone and Coleridge. 

Again, there were no clubs in those days, — none at 
all in our modern sense, and but few of any kind, — and 
the tavern was the club of the couimunity. Here men 
of all kinds met and gathered in circles, according to 
their several tastes, — sometimes in the private apart- 
ments, sometimes in the common room. The "private 
bar" is now, perhaps, a survival of those usages. Dr. 
Johnson and his friends frequently, according to tra- 
dition, sat in the public room, dominating it both by 
their numbers and by the power and brilliancy of their 
conversation. A stranger would probably have been a 
K 19 



218 LONDON. 

little crowded down unless he chanced to have been a 
congenial mind. Here came from evening to evening 
the young barristers from the adjacent Temple and law 
inns, the worthy tradesmen of the neighborhood, who 
lived above their shoj)S and banks (the famous "Childs" 
bank was close to the Mitre), the Avriters for the 
meagre journals of the day. Perhaps a stranger from 
the country counties occasionally dropped in, or per- 
chance an adventurous traveller from Penn^s far-off 
Sylvania or Mary Land. The place was the primitive 
"• Saturday Night Club'^ of a century or more ago, in 
London, and of a rather humble class. 

For these great names, we must remember, were 
not in good society at this tavern stage of their exist- 
ence. Shakespeare was, in early life at least, something 
of a vagabond. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer ; some 
of his work stood very near the Cheshire Cheese. 
Later down, Dr. Johnson was to the last a congenial 
Bohemian. He was the old man of the party, who 
gathered around him young Burke and Garrick and 
Goldsmith and other young men, unknown, or who 
had just come up from the country to try their fortunes 
in famous London town. Bos well was, perhaps, the 
nearest to the gentleman of the crowd. The fine gen- 
tlemen of London did not come to these taverns, nor 
did Burke, likely, and many of the others when they 
had made their mark and won fame. Tennyson does 
not now frequent the '' Cock." These tavern days that 
have gone into literature, and by which we know them, 
were the days of their youth and poverty and obscurity. 

It is a striking reflection on the eternity and immor- 
tality of the human side of our existence, and of the 
littleness or nothingness of business or fashion or co- 
temporary success, that what lives of these men is the 
hour they gave to rest and the play of human feeling. 
The point at which they dropped their routine toil, 
their daily life of publishers and business and briefs 
and writs and fees and wages, was the point at which 



HISTORIC TAVERNS. 219 

they touched fame and the common heart of generations 
and nations yet to come. 

A few hundred years ago the tavern was the club 
and the newspaper of the community. But it Avas also 
something more. Public opinion not only was formed 
at these houses, but passed into tradition and was per- 
petuated by them. One can read the history of all 
England to-day in the names of its inns. When our 
English ancestors wished to honor a cause or a man 
they wrote their names on a tavern signboard and 
swung it out to posterity. 

Thus, the St. George and the Green Dragon record 
the familiar mythic legends of our earliest history ; the 
White Horse was the victorious standard of the Saxons 
when they invaded England, — the battle-flag of Hen- 
gist and Horsa ; the Angel is a mutilated survival of a 
favorite old sign, the '^ Salutation of the Angel" to the 
Blessed Virgin, recalling a time when the Ave Maria 
was the evening song of England ; the Saracen's Head 
is a record of the crusades ; the Mitre comes down 
from the old days of Church and State, and the Church 
first. Even as late as the last century Bos well, writing 
of the Fleet Street " Mitre," says Dr. Johnson ap- 
proved the " orthodox High-Church tone of its name." 
In the " Cross-Keys," which is still a familiar sign in 
many towns of Pennsylvania, few of us will recognize 
the crossed keys of St. Peter, but that is just what they 
are, — the very same sign that may be seen on the front of 
the great St. Peter's at Rome. The White Swan is the 
device of Edsvard of Lancaster and the White Hart of 
Richard the Second. The humble Blue Pig is a sur- 
vival of the Blue Boar, the crest of Richard III. The 
Rose is the badge of the Tudors, and the rose and the 
portcullis will be found blazoned alike on cathedral 
and tavern all over England. The Bear is the emblem 
of the Leicesters, the Antelope of the Boluins, and, 
indeed, the family arms of all England are carved and 



220 LONDON. 

painted over all the land on its inns, — the rude Herald's 
College of the people. When once one becomes a little 
familiar with these crests, it is always easy to tell in 
what part of the country one is by looking at the village 
inns. This adoption of the family crest as a tavern 
sign is very natural, as these country inns are generally 
kept by retired servants of the great families of the 
place, — a fact which, in turn, accounts largely for their 
comfort and excellent service. 

This political nomenclature of the inns is proof that 
they filled the office of clubs in our communities. 
There were no Union League and Tammany clubs to 
gather up and organize political opinion, but the poli- 
ticians of every faith did have their special taverns, 
where the men of each cause could meet, strengthen 
each other, and propagate their ideas. The old Eng- 
lish feeling had its White Horses, the Church party 
their Cross-Keys and Mitres, the Nationalists their 
Crowns and King's Heads. 

It is solid evidence of the social advance of our land 
that we have dropped this usage of naming taverns or 
hotels as an expression either of popular esteem or of 
political honor. There are a few Washington and 
Jefferson and Lafayette houses, that have come down 
from the Revolution, and a scattering Jackson tavern, 
but the habit about ended with the rude time and life 
of which Jackson was the last distinguished exponent. 
We have Lincoln Universities now, but no Lincoln 
Hotels, and there are no Grant or Sherman or Stanton 
or Hancock Taverns, although we have just passed the 
throes of a civil war. 

The tavern is no longer a factor in American society. 

London. 



SCOTLAND. 



19* 221 



CHAPTER XXIY. 

ENTERING SCOTLAND. 

The Scotch Blood in the United States — Strong Stamp 
OF the Scotch Character on our Nation — The Koman 
Catholic and Presbyterian Clans — Margaret Wilson. 

As you travel northward from the heated and murky 
fogs of London a change comes gradually over the 
scene. The smiling harvests of grain and corn give 
way to slatternly-looking turnip-fields ; the trains and 
coaches advertise to run on " lawful days ;" the children 
by the wayside grow barelegged and barefooted ; green 
hills and meadows are replaced by brow^n and red 
ranges, whose infinite lines, stretching out one beyond 
the other, sweep out against the sky ; the hats of the 
men diminish to rimless cloth caps ; the petticoats of the 
women shorten and thicken ; bright shocks of flaming 
red and fair blond yellow hair vary the rather neutral 
sameness of the English head ; the naked knees of the 
men emerge; whisky redolent of peat becomes the 
regular station refreshment, taken with a serious and 
solemn air ; old ladies appear in the cars reading " The 
Christian Herald," and seeming to find great satisfac- 
tion therein ; the faces at each passing railway station 
become more and more reflective, lined, and joyless ; 
red heather, black-footed Cheviot sheep, tartan plaids 
and half-military kilts greet your eye for the first time 
on their native heath : you are in Scotland. 

I have made a pretty thorough tour of this country, 
which has done so much for our land, and which is it- 
self so crowTled with incident in the history of freedom. 
Starting from Edinboro', I have travelled by the great 

223 



224 SCOTLAND. 

Highland Railway — the backbone of Scotlanrl — to Inver- 
ness, the capital of the Highland region ; thence down- 
ward by the scenic Caledonian chain of lakes, — the 
Rhine of Scotland ; thence from Oban out to lona and 
through the Hebrides and back ; thence across-country 
by stage and rail to Aberdeen ; thence back again by a 
lower route to Stirling ; and then by the classic Lochs 
Lomond and Katrine into Glasgow, and from there 
again into Argyllshire. 

It is interesting and instructive to see how thoroughly 
the Scotch mind has stamped itself on our country, on 
our manners, speech, and habit of thought. Although 
the pure Scotch migration to the United States has been 
comparatively small as weighed, for instance, against 
the German or Irish, it has impressed its force more 
definitely and lastingly than either. It almost seems to 
be the substratum of our national character. 

In Scotland one meets all the time customs, usages, 
tones, inflections of speech, incidents, and little things 
of all kinds which recall the interior country life of our 
own land, and show how thoroughly we have been 
cradled in these hills. It is from these cold, bracing 
mountains that we get, first and last, and best of all, 
that unquestionable love of liberty and sense of personal 
independence which has made us what we are, — which 
may be uncomfortable or unpleasant in some of its man- 
ifestations and inimical to vast undertakings, but which 
is the salt of true political and social advancement. 
Scotland is a land of small undertakings, of small bus- 
inesses, and of small fortunes, because the Scotchman is 
not a ready tool or executive instrument for the uses 
of others ; but then he is free, — the head of his own little 
home, the master of his own movements. 

While we have secured this strong bone and sinew 
of the Scotchman as the framework of our new national 
life, we have clothed it with a much more generous 
body. We are essentially eclectic and able to take and 
assimilate the best of all other nations, peoples, and 



ENTERING SCOTLAND. 225 

races. Now, the Scot is a Celt, and the Celtic blood by 
itself has never attained very great tilings. It is, how- 
ever, the very best flux to mix with other bloods. Even 
crossed with itself it improves. The Scotch-Irishman is 
a much stronger man and race than either the Scotch or 
the Irish by itself. It is through this fortunate blend- 
ing that it affects particularly our national character. 

The old distinctive characteristics linger longest in the 
individual. My own blood in one line comes directly 
from Argyllshire, and I was interested, of course, in 
studying the characteristics of this especial people, 
whom I do not think the lapse of the one hundred and 
eighty years since I left them have much changed. 
Manners, of course, have softened, ideas have broadened 
and liberalized, but the old essential fibre and charac- 
teristics are there yet. It is said of this people that 
" they never forget a benefit or forgive a wrong," and 
this rule of blood, whatever may be thought of it as a 
rule of morals, is admirably adapted to perpetuate race 
instincts and individuality. 

And tliis is certainly so here. The friendships and 
hatreds, the loyalties and enmities, of hundreds of years 
ago are all extant forces yet and part of the counnon 
life of the people. Often the remembrance is but senti- 
mental, as in the feeling for the Stuarts, but it is there 
still in that form. The Scotch of this day sing and 
play the old Jacobite songs with a spirit and feeling 
and power of emotion that in Celtic Paris would surely 
evoke a revolution. 

Families, although they do not murder each other 
any more, retain the old traditions of feuds in jj/a»i 
memoriam, and the old political divisions are still per- 
petuated in a variance of faith and Church allegiance. 
The old loyalist Scottish clans are Roman Catholic yet, 
— staunch and devoted and true. The Protestant ascen- 
dency in Church and State has not swerved them, and 
in many parts of Western Scotland you still find small 
districts — the clan territories of the old Stuart lieges — 
2> 



226 SCOTLAND. 

which are thoroughly Roman Catholic, high and low, 
poor and rich, for they are all of one family, — the chief 
and his followers. 

These little sections seem quite an anachronism in 
stern Presbyterian Scotland, but they serve to show the 
undying tenacity with which the Scotch blood follows 
a friend or fights a foe. 

On a little steamer on one of the Highland lakes I 
fell in with a young Roman Catholic priest, — a gentle- 
man of education and of gentle birth, — an Englishman, 
but on duty in the snows of Scotland. 

I told him that " I thought he looked rather cold up 
here, and was afraid he was sowing seed on pretty rocky 
soil/^ 

He replied, laughing, " that faith would remove even 
Scotch mountains." 

Another priest, of more years and with his enthusiasm 
tempered by larger experience, summed up the situation 
more practically with the candid statement that " it takes 
more money to convert a Scotchman than he is worth.'' 

When we got to the end of our journey the young 
priest showed me, with a good deal of pride, quite a 
noble pile of buildings which were going up as a mon- 
astery and school, and to which he was attached as one 
of the brothers. I did not think it right to dampen his 
religious ardor and hope, even if I had had the heart to 
do so, but I am very sure that he will not get a Scotch 
boy in his school save from the old Royalist clans, who 
are already Catholic, and would remain so without 
schools or care. As he was an English gentleman, 
however, his own faith was probably a matter of descent 
and family pride, — I mean in the good sense of that 
word. 

It is very curious, indeed, to observe how all along 
here a man's religion, or his Church relations rather, 
follow" as an obligation to certain family traditions or to 
a family's position. Even the head of a great house 
does not presume to lead it or dictate to it in this mat- 



ENTERING SCOTLAND. 227 

ter. He simply accepts the situation to which he has 
been born, respects the collective sense of his tribe or 
clan, and puts himself at the head of it. Said a very 
large Scottish landowner of high rank to me one day 
walking over his estates : " Two-thirds of my tenants 
go to the kirk, and I think, therefore, I ought to go, 
too. Don't you think so ?" I unqualifiedly said " Yes." 

This gentleman's taste, in all probability, would have 
led him to prefer personally the highly-finished and 
artistic service of the Established Church of England, 
but duty, as the head of an old historical family, led 
him every Sunday to the bare walls of the little village 
kirk. Now the country kirk of Scotland is something 
" bluer" than the old-fashioned Seceder congregations 
of Pennsylvania in early days, — harder benches, 
longer psalms, just as disjointed tunes, longer prayers, 
longer Scripture readings and more of them, and a ser- 
mon utterly unrestrained by any sense of time. 

For the same reason, many of the Scotch nobility are 
Liberals in politics because their family and clan have 
been Whigs in past times. 

Scotland, politically, belongs to the " Liberal" party, 
lords and people naturally inclining that way by reason 
of their blood and history. It flows naturally from 
their almost fierce sense of independence, which sho^vs 
itself everywhere. 

I have often talked with very humble members of 
the " Free Kirk of Scotland," the people's Church. 

^' Is not the difference between you and the Estab- 
lished Church only one of church government?" 

"No; it is something a great deal deeper than a 
question of government when the queen or the govern- 
ment can send dow^n a minister to us against our will." 

" Would such a thing ever be done ? Has it ever 
been done?" 

" I don't know. It is enough that it can be done. 
We will never allow such an authority. It is not 
right." 



228 SCOTLAND. 

And the feeling with which such words were always 
uttered showed that it was a real matter of principle 
and belief, for which the Scotch peasant or croftsman 
of to-day would sacrifice comfort and advancement, or 
fight, or, if needs be, die, just as he has done again and 
again for generations. 

The memory of these humble martyrs or affiants for 
the truth is cherished everywhere in Scotland in 
memorials often touching in their rudeness. Janet 
Geddes, who drove the Established Church of England 
out of Scotland with a three-legged stool, is remembered 
with a good deal of warmth in the popular heart. In 
this town of Stirling, tlie central feature of the fine 
park cemetery which lies grandly on a castellated hill, 
is a monument to Margaret Wilson, whose story is a 
household legend in Presbyterian America, and whose 
death is one of the most wonderful of martyrdoms. 
This young girl in her teens, tied to a stake in the 
Sol way tide, died bravely and calmly rather than 
acknowledge the Episcopal supremacy as a governing 
power in the Church. She surely did not understand 
the full scope and grasp of the question, — could not 
by reason of her years and want of education. She 
only knew that the Stuarts were forcing it on Scotland, 
that it was a threat to the liberty of her country and a 
danger to freedom, and she willingly gave her testimony 
against it, even unto death. 

The monument which commemorates this grand fact 
and this great national characteristic is, I regret to say, 
in the very worst of taste. Some marble figures are 
inclosed in a glass case on a stone pedestal. The color- 
less glass is bordered with strips of the same material 
in deep blue and light green, while the whole body of 
the monument is plastered over with texts and multi- 
tudinous Scripture references too bulky for any particu- 
lar appositeness. This when the whole Bible and all 
history is ringing with single grand words that fit the 
occasion ! 



ENTERING SCOTLAND. 229 

The main inscription begins witli a gush about " the 
virgin martyr of the ocean wave," and ends with the 
information that she chose to die " rather than own to 
Erastian usurpation." This heroic grave is one of the 
worst instances of the Scotch want of taste and uncoutJi 
tendency to obtrude theological technicalities every- 
where. 

While I was looking at this tomb three young Scotch 
soldiers with kilts were slowly working out the cumber- 
some inscription, and one, familiar with the story, was 
trying to tell it to his comrades, apparently recruits. 
He naturally found some difficulty in this, as " Eras- 
tianism" was not a garrison word. He struggled 
bravely with the trouble, however, and summed up 
the whole matter by asserting that she was right any- 
how, and died because she was. And with a hearty 
oath the two new boys confirmed the statement — " Yes, 

and , she was." And the story and its 

lesson went rudely down to another generation. 

I noticed the entire evening I spent in this old 
graveyard that this grave was surrounded by humble, 
plain people, reading its barbarous inscription sorrow- 
fully, and honoring in respectful silence the martyr. 
Being Scotch, they could not lay a flower on the tomb 
or kneel in prayer at the grave, as French women or 
men or Italians would have done at the shrine of their 
saint; but they were taking it all in, nevertheless. 
Margaret Wilson died in 1685. Her grave and her 
memory are as green as if the relentless waters had 
gone over her young body only yesterday. They are 
the fads of Stirling remembered in the common heart 
before all the deeds of the hundred chieftains who have 
fought around this citadel and made it the central point 
of Scottish history. Her grave lies in sight of twelve 
battle-fields of Scotland, but she is the greatest warrior 
of all. 

We owe much to Scotland, but this legacy of per- 
sonal independence and determination, this unwilling- 

20 



230 SCOTLAND. 

ness ever to yield, ever to submit to a wrong, ever to 
compromise, is her best and greatest gift. 
Stirling, Scotland. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

SCOTTISH NOTES. 

The Lowek Side of Scotch Life — Scotch "Whiskey and its 
Reign — The Hardness of Scotch Poverty — Higher 
Scotland — Scotch Thrift — Scotch Newspapers — Scotch 
Hotels — Kural Scotland going Forward — The Theo- 
logical Scot. 

Let me throw together some observations on certain 
phases of Scotch life and some Scotch institutions as 
seen in a pretty extended tour of six weeks over all the 
kingdom. It is a land of sharp contrasts and salient 
features, the old and the new existing yet side by side, 
sometimes fusing but sometimes standing apart. 

I had heard much of the bad condition of the lowest 
classes in Scotland, but was hardly prepared for the 
appalling truth as exhibited in the streets of their 
larger towns. There is a misery and degradation here 
which is perhaps unequalled in any civilized land. 
There is a dirtiness that I think surpasses the filth of 
Italy, and it is unrelieved by bright eyes and smiling 
faces and beautiful forms and graceful movement, 
Scotch poverty is simple, sullen, vicious-looking degra- 
dation. Instead of song and music and pleasing lying, 
the Scotch lazzaroni are given over to the beastly vices 
of drunkenness and prostitution, which are fearfully 
prevalent and whose results are clearly visible on the 
lower streets of every town of any size in Scotland. 
Begging, too, is prevalent, and the squalid mendicant, 
with brutal slouch and rum-burnt visage, stoutly curses 
and swears at you when you refuse him. 



SCOTTISH NOTES. 231 

So degraded and unclean are the herds who swarm 
even good streets that in Glasgow, for instance, after 
night, I have left the pavement and taken the middle 
of the street rather than run the risk of being brushed 
against by beings reeking with the marks and odors of 
disease, filth, and uncleanness. 

But the saddest feature of Scotch degradation is the 
way it seems to harden the individual and drive out 
everything that is softening or gentle or relieving in 
human nature. The faces of the poor are pinched, 
meagre, calculating; their voices hardened and harsh ; 
their tones angry and impatient ; their eyes sullen and 
vicious. Everything of light and hope is gone even 
from the little children ; all is ungracious and unlovely. 
The little things start life with this dreadful heritage. 
Some days since, on the outskirts of Stirling, being in 
some doubt at the forks of a road, I asked my way of 
a little girl who, with bare legs, uncombed hair, ill clad, 
and no bonnet, was swinging alone on the fence, and 
gave her a few pennies. The child seemed confused at 
being kindly spoken to, and I fear the gift was an en- 
tirely new revelation. After recovering from the sur- 
prise the little thing, with a look of wonder still on her 
face, and extremely grateful, began to explain the way, 
offering to go along, and very anxious to do something 
in return. It was painful to see her evident attempt to 
speak in pleasant, gentle tones and the inexorable fail- 
ure. Her voice was already hard and set, and against 
her will and to her deep mortification and distress the 
words would only come out in the old harsh, ungracious, 
ugly tones, — the only sounds she knew. 

Again, this morning in Glasgow, in one of the low 
streets leading to the great cathedral, which now stands 
in a dismal and dirty quarter of the town, I heard a 
squalid, degraded woman, who was carrying a wretched, 
meagre babe in her arms, both half naked, address it 
thus : " Shet up your cryin', will you ? 1^11 choke you 
ded and brek your hed against the wall. Whust now V' 



232 SCOTLAND. 

The woman was not drunk. It was her own child, and 
the words, although spoken in a rude and rigid tone, 
were not unkindly meant. They were, in fact, a 
Glasgow lullaby, the ^^ sounds from home'^ of this 
quarter. 

Much of this utter lowness and degradation of Scotch 
poverty comes from the frightful habits of drinking 
which prevail among the poorer classes of men and 
women, but this will not account for it all, for the 
drinking itself is, in part, only a result of the degrada- 
tion. The Scotch people are making an earnest and 
desperate fight against intemperance all over Scotland, 
and well they may, for a more shocking exhibition of 
national drunkenness, I suppose, is not to be seen the 
world over than that which protrudes itself everywhere 
on the traveller in this land. You see drunken men 
reeling in the streets, and, women, too, in broad day- 
light, and often quite early in the morning. And it is 
not confined to what might be called the lowest classes. 
I frequently see venerable-looking old men with white 
hair, and whose countenances indicate that they have 
led fairly intelligent and industrious lives, staggering 
blindly, or, as is more often the case, attempting to 
hold a drunken argument with any passer-by they can 
fasten. To-day I saw in this town of Glasgow a very 
respectable-looking young woman of about thirty, very 
neatly and quite well dressed, apparently the wife of a 
well-to-do mechanic, reeling for half a square in mid- 
day through a crowded street. Old women, gray-haired 
and bent, their faces bloated and burnt flaming red with 
years of drink, meet you everywhere, and are to an 
American stranger the marked and most repulsive 
feature of the begging class. 

It is needless to say that drinking-shops and small 
retail shops of liquor "not to be drunk on the premises,'' 
abound in all the streets. Their number is something 
ghastly ; they are low, dirty, dingy, and squalid, and 
in front of them hang around all day squads of vicious, 



SCOTTISH NOTES. 233 

criminal-looking young men with that villainous slouch 
and sullen gait so well known in the police and quarter 
sessions courts. 

The drunkenness of Scotland, like its poverty, is 
something hideous, unrelieved by a single softening 
feature, even in the way of glamour. There is no 
attempt to mask it or excuse it or commend it. The 
gin-shops are not palaces of gas and light, as in other 
lands, to allure and tempt. They are foul dens, which, 
in most countries, would repel and disgust, but here 
they are sought. The Scotch drunkard evidently drinks 
to be drunk, shamelessly, from the lowest and most 
brutish of purposes ; and it is this which makes his 
case so hopeless, and so warmly enlists one's sympathies 
for the men and women who are fighting the up-hill 
battle for the redemption of their land from its greatest 
curse. 

The cause or causes of the wretched and debased 
condition of the poorest classes of Scotland is an inter- 
esting and very difficult social problem, covering a vast 
range of inquiry, into which there is not time to go in a 
letter, or perhaps even in a single book. I aim here 
only to present the facts, not to account for them. In- 
dependent of its interest as a study in social science, 
this question has a deeper importance for us Americans, 
as there is a strong family likeness between our two 
civilizations, or conditions of society. Scotland, as we 
are, is a land of churches and Bibles; a land of schools 
and newspapers and common education ; a land of read- 
ing and a general diffusion of average and commonplace 
information (even the drunken Scotchman is argumen- 
tative and ludicrously hortatory); a land "Liberal" in 
its politics, and the Liberal party here stands to the 
Tory as the Republican does to the Democratic in our 
country, the party of advanced ideas and progress ; 
yet, in one of the first and fundamental trusts of the 
Church and of the State — the care of the ])oor — it has 
made a complete and terrible failure. I believe, delib- 

20* 



234 SCOTLAND. 

erately, that it is far better to-day, better for soul and 
body, to be an Italian peasant, ignorant, in rags, 
trodden under in politics, image worshipping, and 
lying, if you will, but happy, full of the human 
emotions, with grace of body and movement, able to 
sing and to speak kindly and lovingly, with the power 
to enjoy the beautiful in nature and art, than to endure 
the brutal degradation of Scotch poverty as seen in her 
cities, — a degradation which breeds coarse and debasing 
vices, crushes the light out of the eyes of its victim, 
self-respect from liis face, and hope from his soul ; 
which not only leaves him nothing to enjoy, but takes 
away even the power of enjoyment; which robs even 
childhood of its birthright of love and careless pleasure. 

But let us turn to something more pleasant. 

Rural Scotland presents a pleasant contrast to the 
towns and cities. If there is suffering there at least it 
is not concentrated. Drink and its attendant evils there 
are. Country Scotland, witii its new granite farm- 
houses, looks solid, comfortable, and prosperous. In- 
deed, large portions of it look like a new country, so 
thoroughly has rebuilding or new building been going 
on within the present generation. The old thatched 
mud cottage, rudely built and very humble in appear- 
ance, is giving way to neat new small buildings of solid 
masonry, the gray granite looking not merely thrifty, 
but quite substantial. In many places you see the old 
quarters still standing, abandoned, perhaps, or used as 
temporary shelter for cattle or animals, and the cluster 
of new buildings, trim and comfortable, rising from 
some better located site on the farm. This is the Scot- 
land that is going forward. 

There is a curious, raw-boned, theological cast to the 
Scotch popular mind which crops out everywhere, and 
the disposition to obtrude theological technicalities into 
common life is very marked, and sometimes pro- 
duces odd effects. I have mentioned how the dramatic 
martyrdom of Margaret Wilson is blanketed on her 



SCOTTISH NOTES. 235 

tomb as the death of one " who would not own to Eras- 
tianism." On the gravestones in the cemeteries, instead 
of a salient clause or effective word from Scripture, 
are copious references to passages simply by chapter and 
verse, thus : Deut., c. xxxv., v., vi., or 1st Kings, c. 
xxiii., v., xviii. Often a stone is fairly covered over 
with these references, in part to verses and sometimes 
to whole chapters at once. A favorite mortuary in- 
scription is a very positive " Covenant" reference im- 
plying indirectly that this stone evidences a completed 
contract, and sometimes with a kind of baldness that 
rather jars on one's sense of delicacy, to say nothing 
of reverence. To get the proper effect of an average 
Scotch cemetery one must go through it Bible in hand, 
and then it would be several days' good work. Again, 
in a country Scotch church, when the minister announces 
his text, reads it, and alleges that it comes from a cer- 
tain chapter and verse, the whole congregation picks 
up its Bibles and refers to the place to verify their pas- 
tor^s word or satisfy themselves individually on some 
other point. 

In the bookstores and stalls there is a distinctly theo- 
logical coloring to the volumes and prints exposed for 
sale. In Edinburgh, for instance, they do not seem to 
have gotten over the Reformation yet, and are still 
fighting it out with polemic treatises and newspaper 
articles. I have noticed also one or two popular peri- 
odicals which announce a weekly " prophetic'^ article as 
among their attractions. In Glasgow I passed a poor 
blind beggar, who stood by the wayside begging in a 
rather common and crowded street, and to attract atten- 
tion was laboriously reading word by word by touch 
out of a Bible printed in raised letters. He w^as tugging 
away in the dust and dirt at a chapter from the Epistle 
to the Hebrews by way of catching the popular ear. 

There is one institution in Glasgow worthy of note, — 
the Great Western Cooking Depot. This famed phil- 
anthropic institution is something like the excellent 



236 SCOTLAND. 

Philadelphia model coiFee-houses, — its object is to supply 
cheap food, well cooked, for the poorer classes. It does 
supply a good plain breakfast, substantial enough for a 
hungry workingman, at a cost of six cents of our money, 
and a dinner, soup, meat, potatoes, and pudding, for 
nine cents. Now, Glasgow is a city which imports food 
from us, grain, pork, canned meats, live cattle, dead 
cattle, dead sheep, tallow, lard, butter, and cheese, and 
many other articles. If Glasgow, importing from us, 
can feed workmen at fifteen cents a day, what ought we 
not to do ? 

Indeed, in every way the prices of common things 
seem to be very cheap in Glasgow, and from a super- 
ficial look at the streets, I should say that the workman 
making a dollar a day here was as well off as one 
making say one dollar and forty cents a day in Phila- 
delphia. I cannot speak as to rents, and base my 
estimates only on food and clothing. 

The Scotch newspapers resemble the American nearer 
than do those of any other country. In the Scotch 
towns the multiplicity of papers and of readers is quite 
marked in contrast with England. You see it the mo- 
ment you cross the line. Towns like Glasgow and 
Edinburgh, and even much smaller places, all have 
their crop of dailies, morning and afternoon. 

On the other hand, these papers tend continually 
to average and commonplace level, and do not have 
the weight or influence of the English. They are 
" snappy" and smart rather than thoughtful and 
strong, of the terrier rather than the bull-dog style. 

The reason for this similarity of the Scotch and 
American paper is a similarity of social structure. 
There is in Scotland the same vast mass of crude half- 
education diffused through all the community as with us. 

I am not speaking in condemnation of the Scotch 
papers. They answer a very useful and respectable 
purpose. They supply the kind of food that is wanted 
for a large lower- and middle-class population of super- 



SCOTTISH NOTES. 237 

ficlal intelligence which is numerous in Scotland. In 
England there is no such class, the lower strata of so- 
ciety being very ignorant, and not readers of anything. 
The papers of England, therefore, appeal solely to the 
upper and governing class, which is a class of educa- 
tion, the class of the universities, of prestige of birth, 
of wide experience of men and travel. Tliey are writ- 
ten by that class for their own class. The Scotch 
papers necessarily, with some few prominent excep- 
tions, are not. 

Scotland shares with us the fortune or misfortune of 
leading in the drift of modern civilization, which in its 
present stage is a movement towards the apotheosis of the 
average and commonplace. Good men of both parties, 
the Liberal and Conservative, tell me that there is a 
growing tendency the same way in politics, — i.e., to the 
evolution of commonplace men, the men who make an 
impression on the crude and half-educated mind. 

The Scotch hotels of the better kind — the laro-e and 
newly-built houses — are more like the American ones 
than any I have found anywhere in Britain or on the 
Continent. They have our spacious public provision 
for comfort nowhere found on the same scale in Euro- 
pean hostelries, generous wash- and retiring-rooms, 
billiard-rooms, writing-rooms, reading-rooms, public 
parlors. While they thus approach the virtues of our 
system, they also share its vices, — defective service, 
hurry, and a mechanical routine. 

It is worthy of remark that Scotland, from which 
we took so much one or two centuries ago, is now taking 
back from us the new institutions which we have devel- 
oped under our new condition. 

I close wdth a Scottish note of to-day, which illus- 
trates how^ thoroughly the old Scottish S})irit of integ- 
rity, the spirit which willingly sacrifices itself for right, 
the spirit which utterly refuses compromise or half-way 
settlement with wrong, is alive and burning in Scotland 
to-day. It is one of the principles of the United Pres- 



238 SCOTLAND. 

byterian Church not to accept money for sacred uses 
from unclean hands. They decline to take for God, 
and as His agent or minister, money that, as far as 
they can see, has not been honestly made. 

When the great Glasgow Bank failure took place 
here some of the directors were members of the United 
Presbyterian congregations of the city, and one or more 
of them were large givers, — almost the support, I am 
told, of their particular churches. When, by the judg- 
ment of the civil courts, these directors were declared 
to have been guilty of systematic fraud for some years 
back, their liberal donations were all returned to them, 
although it more than crippled the congregations who 
did it. 

This fact was told me not by any of themselves, but 
by a learned clergyman of the Established Church of 
Scotland, who bore honorable testimony to their devo- 
tion to principle, and their own profession. 

Glasgow, Scotland. 



CHAPTER XXyi. 

TOWARDS THE HEBRIDES. 

The Highlands and the West Coast or Scotland — Home 
or THE Clan Cameron — Presbyterian Scotland of To- 
day — A Sabbath Eve in Argy'leshire — A Kirk Fair — 
The Apples oe Oban — At a Scotch Kirk — The Trooper 
Claverhouse in Silk Attire. 

I STARTED for ^' loua's holy fane" from Inverness, 
intending to give a summer's month to the bracing 
storms and sheeted vapors of the Hebrides, seeking 
health and youth in the shadowy land of Ossianic tra- 
dition, that land whose song and legend are born in 



TOWARDS THE HEBRIDES. 239 

one with Highland blood, and which the descendant 
of Celtic ancestry visits, not as a strange country, but 
as one going back into the mists and vague eternity 
of childhood. It is wonderful how human existence, 
through these nebulous vapors and the cloudy sweep 
of storm and wind and spray, seems to almost tone and 
merge itself into the infinite life of the universe. Clouds 
here encircle the form of our fathers, their voices ride 
on the winds, and the whole spirit and imagery of Os- 
sian is as real as the rocks and the waves. 

Inverness is a central part of departure on the north- 
east coast of Scotland, although almost in the centre 
of the northern counties, the great Moray Firth here 
breaking into the shore for a hundred miles or more. 
It. is a kind of base of supplies for the tourist under- 
taking a campaign against Hebridian fogs and tempests, 
— a place where you can buy stout hunters' shoes and 
sailors' headgear and waterproof and wondrous Scotch 
tweeds with yawning flaps and capotes. 

From this point the best road to the west coast lies 
through the Caledonian canal or water-way, cutting 
right through the Highlands, and which is formed by 
connecting several long, narrow lakes by short canals. 
It is something like the old military water-line in pro- 
vincial times of our own country, formed by Lake 
George and Lake Cham plain. This route is known as 
the Rhine of Scotland, and is always thronged with 
summer travel. It is wild and beautiful, every hill 
replete with legend and incident, and to a Scotch- 
American every town and name recalling home associ- 
ations. 

Along here is the home of the Camerons, who are 
pretty thick in their own section, — a thin-faced, active, 
aggressive race, lords and liegemen, with a common 
type of feature, like that of the distinguished Pennsyl- 
vanian family. I also found the Buchanan family face 
a very marked type through Scotland. You see on this 
route a modest stone shaft, known as the Royal Charlie. 



240 SCOTLAND. 

It is a granite pillar which marks the exact spot where, 
in 1745, the Clan Cameron, seven hundred strong, 
raised the standard of Prince Charles Edward, — an act 
which was more plucky than long-headed, as seen in 
our light, but which might have been a fair political 
risk one hundred and fifty years ago. Here, also, they 
show you the dramatic wreck of the house of Lochiel, 
— the very spot on which the last of the name know- 
ingly accepted death and ruin and the extinction of his 
family name to save his honor and make good his 
pledged word by a desperate and hopeless conflict. 

Of a weather-beaten, kilted Highlander, who stood 
near me at the time, I asked, — 

^' Have you many Camerons about here now ?" 

" Yes ; a good many." 

" Do they go much into politics over here ?'^ 

" Well,'' laughing, " Ave think a good deal of them 
in this part, and one of them is our member of Parlia- 
ment just now." 

" What's his name ?" 

'' Donald." ' 

In London I looked over the Parliamentary roll, and 
sure enough the member for Inverness is Donald Cam- 
eron. This Donald Cameron is a Conservative, while 
the general political drift of Scotland is strongly Liberal. 
But the individual Scotchman, as I have before said, 
never forgets a friend or a foe, and the Clan Cameron 
of 1879 is staunch to the tradition of 1745. 

You end the Caledonia Canal route at Oban, "" the 
Charing-Cross of the Highlands," where you make 
ready to take the seas. It is a remote Scottish village, 
situated beautifully on a bay, the inland extremity of 
which its streets encircle very prettily. I got here on 
Saturday, and remained over Sunday, engaging passage 
in a coasting vessel for Monday to lona. I was anxious 
to have an interior view of modern Scotch village-life, 
and very glad of the opportunity to see it here in its 



TOWARDS THE HEBRIDES. 241 

simplicity, away from the influences of any " great 
house/' 

We have a conventional idea in many parts of our 
country that in Scotland the Sabbath begins on Satur- 
day evening at sunset ; that the aged cotter at that time 
gets out a ponderous family Bible, collects a cleanly-clad, 
serious family around him in a picturesque tableau, and 
begins the devotions, which continue, with slight 
changes, for twenty-four hours. I had long since given 
up the " cleanly-clad" touch of this picture, but I held 
on to the main design. 

I dined in Oban at six o'clock, and went out on to 
the streets of the little village at about eight. It was 
wet and drizzling, of course, but the children of He- 
bridian mists pay not the least attention to such light dis- 
comforts as rain and mud and darkness. Through the 
leaden, vapory sheets of mist and the obscured clouds I 
could see the faint lights all around the circular line of 
the street and hear coming out of the dense fogs the 
sounds of lively music at different points. Pushing out 
along the water front, all the shops were open, the win- 
dows lighted, the streets full of young men and women. 
Bagpipes were going in one place, and farther oif a horn 
and violin band were playing " Over the River to 
Charlie" with vim and spirit enough to have started a 
French barricade. Some young couples strolled with 
locked hands rather aimlessly from one centre of sound 
to another, steering expertly between the squads of more 
or less drunken men. Generally the town was en fete, 
although after the heavy northern fashion. Barring the 
drunkenness, with the fishermen and the sailors and the 
shepherds and the girls and the music and dreamy 
lights on the sea, you might have fancied yourself in 
Italy had there only been a little moonlight and a few 
Madonnas. 

At the far end of the village stood a rude, frame 
school-house, decked with limp, wet flags, illuminated 
through the chinks and cracks of the planks, and from 
L ^ 21 



242 SCOTLAND 

which the music of fiddles rang merrily Scotch reels and 
the stirring old rebel Jacobite airs. To all appearances 
things had gone so far that the Covenanter youths of 
Scotland were having a Saturday-evening dance just like 
the simple peasantry of Bretagne. It was not quite so 
bad, however. Entering, there was no dancing or pro- 
vision for it. It was only a kirk-fair. The village 
kirk-house was in need of repairs. The repairs were 
being made, and the maids and matrons of the kirk 
were raising or helping to raise the funds. 

The scene within was quite animated, and had the 
ordinary features of a country church-fair in our land. 
The girls, being Scotch, were pretty and lithe and bright; 
the articles of sale as utterly impracticable and valueless 
as if they had been exposed on aristocratic tables in a 
city charitable bazaar. There were some matters of 
detail a little different from our customs. The refresh- 
ment-table, for instance, had a generous supply of wines 
and certain gurgling-necked bottles, which, from their 
familiar national character, I presumed to contain 
whiskey. It would be unfair, however, to look on this 
incident as we would on whiskey sold at an American 
fair or bazaar. Its use is the general habit and custom 
of the country, and there w^as no unseemly drinking or 
noise in the hall. Had you gone into the private house 
of the clergyman of the kirk whiskey would probably 
have been offered you as a common mark of hospitality, 
and I observe that Americans, when in Scotland, however 
they may moralize at home on the evil consequences, 
^ generally take the whiskey. It is an incident of the 
Ossianic mists, and has been so from the times of the 
^ Vikings. 

The prominent and popular feature of the kirk-fair, 
however, was the lottery. Everything was offered in 
chances and shares, and raffling was evidently the most 
successful " ways and means" of the enterprise. My 
companion and myself, assailed on every side, earnestly 
remonstrated with these enthusiastic young Covenanters, 



TOWARDS THE HEBRIDES. 243 

representing that we had been raised as Presbyterians, 
and could not conscientiously indulge in such practices, 
even they bring the fair temptation ; further, that in 
the far-off provinces from which we came all lotteries 
were criminal offences ; that we could not break the 
laws of our own country, even in a foreign land, and 
especially so near to the Sabbath-day. But the young 
women, as usual, were not amenable to reason. There 
were half a dozen young male Americans of Puritan 
training and descent at this village fair that evening, 
and I fear they all ate of the apples of Oban. 

Next morning, however, Scotland was herself again, 
and the Sabbath morning broke upon an Oban as stiff 
and silent and decorous as if there never had been a 
violin or a kirk lottery or a Saturday evening fete 
within its precincts. 

I went to the Established Kirk, where the old faith 
and the old worship hold the fort, strong and safe. It 
was in the main a very familiar scene. The faces were 
just the same as you would see to-day in any country 
Presbyterian congregation in the Cumberland Valley. 
You could pick them all out, elders and deacons, and 
the men that expected in time to be, — the stern, rigid 
faces that accepted nothing on trust, and weighed every 
sentence of their preacher in the balances. The sandy 
features were perhaps in the predominance, but there 
was a strong infusion of the old " black Celt.^' Even 
here the old race characteristics assert their individuality 
and refuse, closed up together for centuries, to blend or 
mingle. Everything was intensely Scotch in look and 
sound and custom. A McDougall was the chief man 
of the congregation, the head of the clan on the bay ; 
an unregenerate young Camjibell, who kicked lustily, 
was forcibly baptized during the services. I sat in the 
pew of Duncan McGregor. The " local color" was all 
an artist could pray for. 

The services of the morning did not differ materially 
from those of an ordinary Presbyterian or Congrega- 



244 SCOTLAND. 

tional congregation in our land, save in the quantity. 
I give the order : singing of a hymn, prayer, reading 
from the Old Testament, singing of a hymn, reading 
from the New Testament, singing of a paraphrase, the 
sermon, prayer, singing of a hymn, baptism, singing, 
benediction, — twel ve separate exercises. Tlie baptismal 
services, which was an interpolation in the order of the 
day, possibly added something. 

There were some differences in the service and scene 
between the old Presbyterian usages of our land worth 
noting. The church building was in cruciform shape, 
and the saints and angels looked down on you from 
rich stained-glass windows. The hymnal was a modern 
collection of two hundred good hymns, many of them 
those in use in our congregational bodies. The Two 
Hundredth, however, was the ordinary English version 
of the Te Deum Laudamus, closing before the Kyrie 
Eleison clauses. The Apostles' Creed and the Lord's 
Prayer were introduced in the extempore pray ere, and 
the Creed again in the baptismal service. The choir 
sat in the apse. 

The preacher was a young man, with red hair parted 
in the middle, whiskers, and a moustache. He wore 
the black gown and bands and a purple university 
hood. He preached a vigorous and able sermon, Old 
Testament throughout in tone and imagery and train 
of thought. His delivery w^as demonstrative and sten- 
torian, markedly in contrast with the quieter and more 
scholarly tone of the English pulpit. It was, however, 
well suited to the place and the audience, to whom, I 
think, his effort — scholarly and thoughtful in its way 
— was very acceptable. He fired a shot at the pope, 
of course. 

I think there are many just such congregations in 
Pennsylvania to-day, and all through the country, even 
out in Alamosa, where, three years ago, I saw the 
atoms of organization arranging themselves, — just such 
bodies of people listening to just the same doctrines 



TOWARDS THE HEBRIDES. 245 

enforced by just the same argument. The preacher 
here was, as his Jiood betokened, a university man, 
and his sermon gave evidence of greater scholarship 
and force of trained thought than the average Ameri- 
can pulpit effort. The stained-glass ^vindo^ys and the 
definite ecclesiastical architecture showed a broader 
sense of power and a larger freedom of culture than 
holds in many of our villages, but they have come in 
the cities and will spread down. 

Time was when the saint in the window and the 
cross of nave and transept was a political emblem, 
much more than anything else, and the sturdy Presby- 
terians of Scotland were perfectly right and logical in 
tearing them down. We are reaping the fruits in our 
civil freedom and religious liberty now. But the time 
is past when such things are to be feared, and there is 
no reason now why all the beauties of art and estab- 
lished aesthetic principles should not adorn the temples 
of any faith in our land or England. 

These changes in the aesthetic development of the 
form and plan of worship have not weakened the vigor 
or power of the faith. The old soul was there in the 
kirk of Oban just as resolute and true, and a good deal 
broader, and, consequently, stronger than a hundred 
years ago. 

It was very interesting to me to trace these simili- 
tudes or divergencies between the Presbyterianism of 
the old land and of our own. They mark and record 
the mental and historical development of the two 
})eoples. There are Presbyterian corners of our land 
that are to-day perhaps more Scotch than Scotland. 
We brought over the Scotland of 1700, and hold it 
there unchanged still, while the General Kirk of Scot- 
land, changing with history and life of a people, has 
gone on to something different. On the other hand, 
there are spots in Scotland which have never changed 
for a hundred years, and will not for a hundred years 
to come. The general religious life of both countries 

21* 



246 SCOTLAND. 

is, however, I think, iiDder somewhat diiferent condi- 
tions, moving; forward much alike, and with very equal 
step. The Presbyterianism of our country and of 
Scotland to-day is much alike, although it is very 
diiferent from what it was either here or there a gen- 
eration ago. But the race holds together in its march. 
I may mention here a little incident of interest in 
this connection which I came across during the summer 
at another point in Scotland. In the drawing-room of 
the Earl of Strath more at Glamis Castle there hangs 
with the family portraits a full-length painting of the 
famous dragoon Claverhouse, whose nauie was once 
such a terror to the Covenanters, and whose memory 
yet is recalled only with unuttered imprecations by 
their descendants. Much to my surprise, thinking of 
him only from the conventional conception of Cove- 
nanter tradition, I found the portrait of an entirely 
different manner of man. He was sumptuously dressed 
in a wealth of rich colored silk that in our time would 
be effeminate, and his form and carriage bore the un- 
mistakable impress of a man accustomed to good so- 
ciety and trained to its amenities. His face was refined, 
pleasing, and almost gentle, — very much the same face 
as those which gather at the castle to-day, with ladies 
and flowers and music, for luncheon and lawn-tennis. 
In this mild, amiable, gentlemanly officer it was impos- 
sible to see the rough and merciless mosstrooper of 
Scottish tradition. There is nothing at all vindictive 
or cruel in the face, and little that is indicative of force. 
I can only infer that Claverhouse was not the motive- 
power of his own action. He was probably an amiable 
kind of man, receptive to the impressions of a stronger 
will, the ready tool of a firmer hand and more cunning 
head, — one of those men who are good for instruments 
and to work under and for others. He had even, pos- 
sibly, a strong religious tendency, which exercised itself 
in following ignorantly and unthinkingly the instruc- 
tions of any ecclesiastical authority to which he professed 



lONA. 247 

fealty. I do not mean to say that he had ecclesiastical 
instruction for his savage forays on the Scotch con- 
venticles, but he was probably taught by his Cliurch, after 
the unchristian spirit of those times, that it was doing 
God service to crush out heresy by violence, and he was 
honest enough to practise what others only preached. 

Let us be thankful for our gentler and better times, 
which enable us to think of this man without anger, 
and to judge him dispassionately. 

At this point of Oban I left the mainland for lona, 
which, with its traditions, as the early seat of our 
Christianity, the northern ark, when all the Avorld was 
in chaos under the flood which swept away the Roman 
Empire and civilization, and Staifa, with its grand 
^' temple not made with human hands," and Ulva^s 
isle, I must leave for another paper. 

Oban, Scotland. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 



ION A. 

The Auroral Light of Northern Christianity — A Storm 
OFF THE West Coast of Scotland — A Eude Westminster 
— The Funeral Cortege of Forgotten Lines of Kings — 
Macbeth's Grave — A Dove of the Church — The Story 
OF St. Columba — The Irish Saints Militant of Old — In 
G^Lic Land — The Home of the Macleans — Iona of To- 
day — The Holy Place of Druid, Pagan, Christian — 
Sailing the Summer Seas of Scottish Romance — Fin- 
gal's Cave, the Cathedral of the Seas — Lord Ullin's 
Daughter — The Highlanders of the Sea. 

"The Hebrid Isles 
Placed far amid the melancholy main." 

Monday morning broke with a fresh, whistling gale 
sweeping along the west coast of Scotland, but as that 
is rather the rule and calm weather the exception on 



248 SCOTLAND. 

the Hebridean seas, our coaster boldly put off from the 
black, slippery dock at Oban, and headed for the lower- 
ing and leaden skies. After a rough passage, with no 
worse disaster than the relentless ravages of the mal de 
mer, wdiich took down a goodly proportion of the pas- 
senger-list, the staunch little craft anchored off a reef 
some distance out from the inhospitable shores of the 
Holy Island, and we visitors were taken aground in 
some little fisherman's boats. The coaster, which, in 
summer-time, makes daily trips to lona, lands its pas- 
sengers in this wise, and after driving them through 
the main ruins of the island, much as you might con- 
duct a herd of cattle, sails away again, all in an hour. 
This seems to have been the unsatisfactory routine from 
the time of Wordsworth, if I read aright the complaint 
of some of his verses. Taking heed from the poet's 
disappointment, my brother and myself concluded to 
lay over the night in a humble inn which is found on 
the island, and, after a day spent at leisure among the 
Druidic and Christian remains, to take a fisherman's 
boat and meet the coasting vessel at some farther point 
out on its next day's trip, when it was to come down 
from the north instead of up from the south. 

This plan, which is the only one by which one can 
see the place intelligently, and which I would adopt 
again were I visiting lona another time, in this instance 
cost us four days' solitary imprisonment on the little 
island. The storm grew only more furious as night 
came on, and the next day seemed only to increase in 
rage. Until Thursday not a vessel ever came in sight, 
or even put out from Scotland, as we afterwards learned, 
and not a fisherman dare leave the shore. All the time 
the entire seas around were lashed with foam, ceaselessly 
breaking and charging on the giant rocks and deadly 
reefs with demoniac fury. Sometimes the angry waters 
seemed forced through clefts or caverns in the rocks, 
and would shoot up into the air columns of foam and 
spray apparently several hundreds of feet high. It 



lONA. 249 

was a supremely magnificent spectacle, and it moved 
all day long and all night to the rhythmic thunders of 
the mighty surges rumbling awful basses away below 
the range of the human scale. During the second day 
the torn and mutilated body of a little boy was washed 
ashore, utterly unrecognizable and unknown. From 
the clothing and other indications the fishermen be- 
lieved it to be some shepherd lad from one of the 
neighboring islands, snatched from the earth by the 
angry sea in one of its frenzied inroads. 

The venerable religious and race associations which 
centre m lona are familiar to the educated w-orld. It 
was, stretching back into remote ages whose antiquity 
cannot now be told, holy ground, — a kind of Mecca, or 
Jerusalem, or Rome, for the savage clans of our fore- 
fathers who rode the northern seas. Scandinavian, Pict, 
Scot, Irish, Celt, Gael, revered its soil, worshipped at 
its altars, and buried their great in its consecrated earth. 
Dr. Johnson calls it ^'this awful ground." During the 
sixth century, when the world was breaking up in the 
convulsive dissolution of the Roman Empire, this little 
isle held the light of Christianity and civilization for 
the new race that was coming on to the scene. It was, 
undoubtedly, a rude faith and a very meagre civiliza- 
tion, but it held the spark, such as it was, and kept the 
flame alive. 

Perhaps the most touching, certainly the most im- 
pressive, of all the remains of lona are its rude, kingly 
graves. In the universal wreck and plunder which 
marked the savage warfare of our Norse ancestors, all 
peoples seem to have respected '^ the Blessed Isle," as 
it was reverentially called, and the bones of the great 
and the good were carried there from afar, that they 
might be safe from spoliation, and await in peace and 
under holy guard the morning of the resurrection. 

Tradition says that for centuries the kings of France, 
and Ireland, and Scotland, and Norway, and of far 
isles were buried here. Here, also, were brought the 



250 SCOTLAND. 

bishops and lordly abbots of legendary memory. The 
cemetery of these royal tombs is shown, and the traces 
of many graves are clearly visible. They lie in long 
rows, many of them under monumental slabs of an 
enduring slate, rudely etched with crosses, croziers, and 
shields and swords and Runic symbols. These slate 
tombstones have a hard, polished surface, and seem 
almost imperishable, and much of the etching is bold 
and spirited. A great Runic cross stretches its pro- 
tecting arms over this sacred enclosure. It is evident 
that there has been some restoration in the arrangement 
of the graves of this yard, and some of the royal tablets 
are certainly over the wrong bodies ; but the general 
fact of the long sanctity of the spot and its kingly 
occupancy is undoubted and established. It is the 
rude Westminster of the unrecorded history of our race. 
This was the burying-place, also, of the Lords of 
the Isles, sung by Sir Walter Scott. Here, too, Mac- 
beth is buried and his murdered sovereign. 

Rosse. — " Where is Duncan's body ?" 
Macduff. — " Carried to Colmekill ; 

The sacred storehouse of his predecessors, 

And guardian of their bones." 

I should have stated before that the ancient name 
of lona — the name of mediseval legend and history — 
is I-Columb-Kill, the island of St. Columba of the 
Church. 

By the aid of a rude monkish chart or map pre- 
served on the island, and giving the contour of the 
shore in its historic days, my brother and myself traced 
the whole outline of the land, and found the tiny bay 
or cove which tradition asserts to have been the laud- 
ing-place of these sad processions. It is a narrow, 
rock-walled entrance of several hundred feet, termi- 
nating in a few yards of smooth, sandy shore covered 
with white and richly-colored pebbles worn almost 
purely round by the endless wash of the waves. I 



lONA. 251 

hear yet the grating rattle of these sounding stones 
ceaselessly rolling alone for centuries. In good weather 
small row-boats might land here with comparative 
safety and in decent quiet. Once on land, a level and 
sheltered stretch of ground affords an appropriate spot 
for a temporary halt and any preliminary services. 
This favored landing is, however, on the opposite shore 
of the island from the cemetery and ecclesiastical build- 
ings, — the cathedral, convent, and consecrated ground, 
— and in a diagonal direction. They bore, therefore, 
the bodies of their kings in stately procession a distance 
of some two miles or more, and over the mountain 
range, which is crossed by a moderate pass, through 
which an imperfect road now winds. 

It was from this far shore of the island that came 
the precious green stones, which, in the Middle Ages, 
])roperly consecrated and blessed, circulated all over 
Europe as holy amulets. 

Our enforced confinement on the island, although 
involuntary, was a pleasant and gainful episode. Four 
days of the storms of the Scottish seas are a substantial 
investment in the way of health, and in no other way 
could we have so entered into the life and spirit of the 
place. Shut out from the world, its solemn traditions 
came slowly back out of the ages, and were part of the 
hour and moment. 

With this time at our disposal we traced out the 
whole plan of the primitive ecclesiastical establishment 
as it stood in the eleventh century, and probably in the 
sixth ; for the later, or restoration, buildings seem to 
have been faithfully erected on the site of the ancient 
sanctuaries built by St. Columba and his disciples, and 
destroyed by the pagan Danes, a.d. 807, when the 
whole island was pillaged, the inhabitants slain, the 
priests sacrificed, and every stone razed to the ground. 

Of St. Columba, whose name is the savor of this 
spot, and whose work gave it a place in history, it is 
difficult to speak truthfully at this time without con- 



252 SCOTLAND. 

veying an erroneous and damaging impression, the 
lights of his age and ours are so different. He comes 
down, of course, in the tradition of the Church, en- 
dowed with all the Christian graces ; a priest burning 
with love ; the ^'Dove of the Church,'^ as his legendary 
name tells; a worker of miracles; a teacher of civili- 
zation ; and the legend always closes with the hal- 
lowing shades of a venerated death- bed, when, full of 
years and honor, and in the odor of sanctity, the saint 
went up in peace and joy to meet his God. These are 
the shades, and this the coloring of the picture drawn 
in the convent and mellowed by time and the softening 
distance of ages. 

Viewed nearer, the lines are much harsher and less 
romantic. We now know St. Columba to have been a 
saint militant of the most aggressive and pugnacious 
kind, for whom even Ireland was too gentle and peace- 
ful a land. We know that his record there was one of 
strife and trouble, and that he finally left it by the 
advice of his ecclesiastical superior. Even when he 
had settled lona, reared his triumphant crosses on its soil, 
erected his convent and set his matin and vesper bells 
a-ringing over its waves, his life then was probably 
nearer that of our Indian frontier than of a modern 
missionary. He had foes within and without; wars 
with the pagan clans of the North seas and with preda- 
tory monks of his own faith, eager as he for conquest 
and adventure. On one occasion some Irish saints of 
a rival order, having landed, gained a footing in lona, 
and built their convent and chapel on the far shore of 
the island; the dove-like Columba, after some inef- 
fective controversies, moved in force, with a detach- 
ment of his saints, against the invading brethren, drove 
them out, and razed to the ground the offending sanc- 
tuary, "as was the law in such cases," gravely annotates 
the faithful chronicler. Every trace of this fated 
mission is now gone, but from the old chart one can 
exactly locate its site, which Is, in all respects save a 



ION A. 253 

commanding sweep for its tower and bells over the 
seas, better than that of St. Columba's. Again, the 
simple biographer and disciple : " Now a question arose 
between St. Columba and St. Comgar concerning a 
church near Coleraine," and it, too, was finally decided 
by a pitched battle between the fraternities of these 
pious leaders. 

I found on this lonely island an old monkish chroni- 
cle, written in rude, mediaeval Latin, of the life and 
adventures of St. Columba, extremely interesting and 
picturesque when read on the spot. Of course, one 
now can hardly believe in the accuracy or literal truth 
of much of it, but, like Pompeiian frescoes or Middle- 
Age tapestries, the whole gave a wonderfully vivid and 
life-like picture of the daily existence of the time, — the 
habits of the saints, the atmosphere of simple credulity 
and childish ignorance in which they habitually moved 
and thought. Everything was rude and humble and 
primitive, their surroundings and accommodations of 
the very simplest and most limited kind. 

St. Columba worked miracles daily and endlessly 
and on the very slightest provocation, but they were 
all of the rudest and most humble incident, — exorcising 
the devil out of a milk-pail carried by one of the 
brothers, holding on a wooden wheel on a cart without 
a linch-pin, or protecting the working brethren from 
the cold and snows. The little road from the brothers' 
house and stables to the church — hardly five hundred 
yards long, and noAV marked at its angles with a fine 
Runic cross, the reverent offering of later centuries — 
was a perfect theatre of spiritual manifestations, the 
angels dividing daily its poor and meagre accommo- 
dations with the brethren. Jacob's glittering ladder 
was hardly so grand a roadway. It was a condition 
of life and thought we can hardly understand, and 
perhaps cannot do justice to at all. The cold, rude 
rocks of this barren islet, with their ruder people, were 
a theatre of the warmest fervency of faith and devo- 

22 



254 SCOTLAND. 

tion. This place was, for these simple, half-barbarian 
Christians, the very gates of heaven, and they lived 
from year to year in a kind of sluggish, arctic ecstasis. 

But this we do know of the heroic saint whose force 
and fervency of character has thrown his name out 
of dark ages far into the light and brilliancy of future 
ones: he was a man of his time and a historic leader. 
However rude some things may sound to us now, he 
had all the education and advantages of his period, — 
the education of the schools, of the monastery, of travel, 
and, I think, of arms. He was also a man of good 
birth, and had the power which always comes from 
high social relations and experience. He was qualified 
for his great work and the time in which he did it. 
His labors were given, not to his own advantage, but 
for his fellows, and his name still lives. 

In the very darkest of the Dark Ages, about a.d. 563, 
Columba, an Irish monk of noble blood, left Ireland, 
and, sailing northward, sought an unknown island and 
founded there a monastic home. He brought with 
him, tradition says, twelve disciples, brother-monks, 
and his avowed mission was the conversion to Chris- 
tianity of the Northern pagan kings and the spread 
of civilization among their tribes. He did convert first 
Connall, king of the Dalriads, a name even that is lost 
now. Successively he brought under the standard of 
the cross the heathen Picts and the Scots, and the 
savage clans of the Orkneys and even of far-off Ice- 
land. From this little seat of learning and faith the 
auroral lights of Northern Christianity were shed in 
this early century even thus far out toward our own 
.unknown continent. 

The force of faith and love which St. Columba had 
centred in this aggressive mission projected itself far 
out for hundreds and hundreds of years, and its mem- 
ory will never die now so long as Christianity en- 
dures. Columba himself died before the century was out. 
He had entered, by human acclamation, the goodly 



lONA. 255 

fellowship of the saints long before death came, and 
the legend of his departure, as told in the simple Latin 
of the old chronicle, is a very beautiful and touching 
story. For three years he liad prayed God without 
ceasing for release, and at last, advised in the night- 
time that his prayer was granted, he repaired at once, 
unattended, through the inclement blasts and snow of 
a boreal winter, to the simple stone altar which had 
been his life-work and whose future was to be so great, 
and there, in the act of prayer, ascended to heaven. 
His body was immediately enshrined in this holy 
place ; the saint was beneath the altar. 

For two hundred years the fires of faith burned 
brightly in lona, illuminating the northern horizon. 
During the chaos of Europe this little island was the 
lamp of the world. It kept alive in its slender flame 
learning and civilization and Christianity. At last, but 
not until a new civilization was emerging in Europe 
from the chaos of the old, its flame, too, was extin- 
guished in a dramatic tragedy. After hopeless strug- 
gles, from time to time, with the Scandinavian pagans, 
long years of fluctuating vicissitudes, of pillages, of 
escape, of plunderings, of martyrdoms, in 807 the 
Danes swept the island with ferocious vengeance, 
destroyed every vestige of building, murdered or 
carried off" the defenceless population, and offered up 
the priests of Christianity on the triumphant altars of 
Odin. Then there was night in lona. 

Generations after, when quieter times came, lona 
was repeopled by Christian converts, her fanes rebuilt, 
her altars re-established. It was then she became 
famous as the remembered cradle of British Chris- 
tianity. It was then that her very soil came to bear 
the flavor of sanctity, and that the kings of warring 
tribes respected it as a common sepulchre. It is the 
ruins of these times that we now see, some of them as 
late, probably, as the thirteenth century, — that wonder- 
ful epoch of cathedral-building all over Europe. It is 



256 SCOTLAND. 

from this period that come the impressive monolithic 
crosses, the slate and granite tombs with kingly helmets 
and lordly mitres, — the emblems of princely abbots at a 
time in British history when the abbot was a far more 
important and powerful personage than is the bishop 
of this age. 

Tlie lona of to-day is a straggling fisherman's 
hamlet of a dozen or so houses, with a few more 
huts for shepherds at solitary points over the island. 
Everything is rude, and, like the island, meagre, poor, 
and scanty. The houses are low, but built of tremen- 
dous thickness of walls, to stand the constant sweep of 
the wind and the periodic break of tempests. These 
poor, rude dwellings are covered with thatch, and the 
thatch secured by a strong network of rope extending 
over the entire roof, and held to its place by large, 
heavy bowlders fastened to the ends. 

Inside the houses everything is simple and primi- 
tive : stone flags for floors, and sometimes only mud ; 
a peg or two for the nets and fishing-tackle, a plain 
stool, some humble kitchen utensils, are generally all 
the furniture. The cleaning up seems to be done by 
the ducks and pigs, which have the freedom of the 
house. 

So small and confined is the settlement, and the life 
of the island so much in common, that the animals 
seem to have lost their fear of mankind, and move 
around like citizens conscious of their ^^ equal rights.'' 
Even the dogs which ran out to meet us in the village 
and over the bare, heathered hills never pkmged out 
angrily, but came forward for the first time with wag- 
ging tails, friendly bark, and every demonstration of 
pleasure, glad to greet a new form. 

There is no coal on the island and no wood, the bar- 
ren hills growing only heather, gorse, and nettles. This 
alone adds fearfully to the poverty of a place that is 
cold and wet nearly all the year round. I make this 
note September 2d, and we are having fire every day, 



ION A. 257 

and all day, in our rooms, and outside the poor farmers 
complain of the lateness of the season. Buttercups, too, 
are blooming now — September — instead of May, as 
with us. 

This island, three miles long by one to two wide, 
has an area of two thousand acres, only six hundred 
of which are capable of cultivation. It yields to its 
owner, the Duke of Argyll, a rental of four hundred 
pounds, — -just a dollar an acre for all the land, good 
and bad. At least one-half of it is rock, and none 
of it would be tilled at all by the average American 
farmer, who would not consider life worth livins; in 
its wet sands. 

When we remember that Ave can buy in Kansas or 
Colorado the best wheat-lands in the world at less per 
acre than the rental for one year of a bleak Scotch sand 
shore, inaccessible and inclement, we can j udge how much 
better is the lot of the poor man with us than here. 

Nevertheless, the place has charms of its own for 
men of this race. The family we are staying with 
came here five years ago as a matter of choice, and I 
made the acquaintance of a Scotch stranger on the land- 
ing who afterwards told me he came here many sum- 
mers from the love of the place. 

The language of the island is Gaelic, and the people 
speak it in a tiiick, guttural tone, and with a shy, half- 
alarmed manner that prevents your even getting at all 
the real sounds. Seeing no one at all save some tour- 
ists for a few weeks in the year, the children run 
around like young savages, barelegged and bare- 
footed, and with thick, black horse-hair falling from 
their heads and over their faces, like our Indians. 
There is no beauty among them, either of face or form. 
Life is too hard. Little children with hard, unlovely 
faces follow you on a trot over sharp stones or through 
coarse wet grass, dirty, unkempt, and almost unclad, 
to sell their meagre treasures of shells or pebbles. 
The little girls we saw wore commonly a short petti- 
r 22* 



258 SCOTLAND. 

coat, not reaching to their knees, and that generally partly 
torn away by exercise and long nse. The color of this 
garment was indiscernible ; the color of their skin was a 
dark, ruddy red, almost that of our savage. Although 
the ground of this island is hard and stony, the winds 
sharp and cutting, and the soil productive of generous 
crops of thistles, nettles, and thorny plants, its inhab- 
itants go about with bare feet and legs with impunity, 
less protected even than the sheep or pigs. 

There is no corn-mill in lona, and the scanty crop 
of grain is carried over to an adjoining island to be 
ground. When this support fails by reason of con- 
tinued storms or absence of the men fishing, resort is 
had to the "quern," or hand-mill, the same as men- 
tioned in the Bible. There are two of these primitive 
mills on the island. 

lona is the home of the Macleans, a stalwart tribe 
well known in Scotch-Irish America. A few genera- 
tions ago every soul on the island bore this name, but 
with the dying out of the clan system this has disap- 
peared, and there are several varieties of family names 
in lona to-day, — all pure Scotch, however. 

The ruins of lona as they stand to-day are very 
moderate and modest compared with those of other 
centres of attraction in this way, — the falling walls of 
the old cathedral, in which you can still trace transept, 
nave, and the usual chapels, the convent, the conse- 
crated burial-ground of the kings, another cemetery 
immediately around the church, the unique crosses at 
these different points, and the staunch, towering cam- 
panile from whose open windows the Christian bells 
hundreds of years ago rang out over the fierce Northern 
seas. The interest of these modest remains is not in 
themselves, but in the vast body of associations which 
they call up and marshal in lengthening hosts that ex- 
tend back through centuries. 

In the middle of the island are found some Druidic 



lONA. 259 

remains of traditional interest. These are not seen at 
all by the visitor who trusts himself to the one-hour 
tour of the vessel's guide, as they are not on the routine 
programme, their distance being too great from the 
landing. Before the times of St. Columba, lona was a 
famed centre of Druid worship, and the traces of the 
familiar contour of a Druidic holy of holies are yet 
visible to patient search, — the central mound and the 
circle of stones, the seats of the angels. We discov- 
ered their location after a good deal of labor, for much 
of it is covered with the drift of a thousand years ; but, 
once ascertained, you can quite definitely locate the 
tumuli and understand their former relations and uses. 
The central mound is quite a hill, — a sharp, green knob 
of uniform curve. 

Later researches, it is claimed, prove that these stone 
circles all over England were not, as is popularly sup- 
posed, built by the Druids, who were Celts, but are the 
work of a far anterior race, — the men of the Stone Age. 
The Stone Age came to an end in Europe about tw'o 
thousand years before the birth of Christ. Its shortest 
duration is estimated at a term of two thousand years. 
This calculation would place the erection of these primi- 
tive temples, say, about three thousand to four thou- 
sand years before the Christian era. Other chronolo- 
gies of the Stone Age would place it still farther back. 

lona is one of those remarkable spots which, from 
prehistoric times, seem always to have been held as 
sacred localities, — points where God came in contact 
with the world, and where He was worshipped and 
revealed without regard to creed or chronology of 
Church speaking " in divers manners in times past." 
In spite of the rudeness and simplicity of its modern 
face, of the meagreness of its remains, of its bleak and 
forbidding location, it is well worth visiting and study. 
Few theatres of human history are more impressive. 
It is one of " the places of the earth." It is a splendid 
page in the militant history of Christianity. There the 



260 SCOTLAND. 

bloody altars of Thor and Odin have smoked, tended by 
our Northern ancestors. There God at sundry times 
in the twilight of the ages spake to our Druid fathers. 

On Thursday, when the winds were calmed and the 
angry ocean had quieted down to comparative reason, 
we hired a fisherman's sail-boat, and, with a pair of 
small but sinewy Gaelic seamen at the oars, pulled off 
for a cruise among the neighboring islands to explore 
the classic seas of school-boy legend and memory. 
Our morning's destination w^as Staifa, with its wondrous 
columnar formation ; our hope, that we might be able 
to enter with our little boat the surging portal of the 
grand nave of Fingal's solemn cave. Every wave 
this morning was crested with associations and story, 
— behind, the campanile of lona, with Oronsay and 
Colonsay, twin islets of saints and mediaeval miracles 
and sacred tradition ; ahead, the frowning masses of 
Mull, the famous stronghold of the Lords of the Isles, 
and " Ulva dark" and the broader lands of the Lords 
of Ullin. 

' Oh ! I'm the chief of Ulva's isle, 
And this Lord Ullin's daughter." 

We skirted the shores of the tragic escapade, and 
sailed over the spot where the " waters wild'' went over 
the fated lovers. 

Fingal's Cave, with its strange basaltic columns, its 
curiously ecclesiastical effect of Gothic roof, {)illared 
nave, and choir of thundering surges, with its dim 
religious lights of green and purple and gold reflected 
from the waves below, is a most impressive and unique 
sight, but it hardly deserves its relative rank among 
the wonders of the world gotten from our crude geog- 
raphies, written at a time when the modern world was 
unexplored, Avhen America and Australia and Africa 
and the great table-lands of India and Central Asia 
were unknown. 



ION A. 261 

This picturesquely imposing cavern is a great cleft 
in the primeval rock, two hundred and twenty-two 
feet long, forty-two feet wide at the entrance, and in 
height sixty-six feet at mean tide. The bottom is 
always a flood of roaring water. The sides are nearly 
parallel, and rise up perpendicularly, closing away up 
in a vaulted roof. They are not })lain walls, however, 
but solid masses of pentagonal and hexagonal columns 
of w^onderful symmetry, and many of them monoliths. 
They present the effect of innumerable corridors of 
columns, — aisles and aisles of them. As a picture, the 
cave most resembles the mighty nave of some great 
cathedral arched in the foundation-rock. Into this 
grand church the waves, with a noise far below the 
range of any human organ, grander and deeper, surge 
forever forward and backward, singing unto each other 
in eternal antiphone. 

Staffa's Island is but a little bit of grass and soil, 
just enough to respectably cover the basaltic ribs of its 
great wonder. You can climb to the top of it and get 
a grand view of the entrance of the cave from over- 
head. You can climb around the side over hundreds 
of broken pillars washed down during the ages by the 
ceaseless violence of the waves, and enter the cavern, 
finding your way from one rude pedestal to another 
along the edge of the columnar wall until you reach 
about where the altar would be in a church, and here 
the spot where the thunderous surges break against the 
massive rock foundation of the island wdth a noise 
mightier than that of the waves, and with deep re- 
sounding bass echoes that never die away. 

Unfortunately, the condition of the waters was such 
that the Gaelic fishermen would not attempt to put their 
boats in, and w^e had to be content with this kind of 
view of the cave, landing on the rear of the island and 
clambering around over the slippery bases denuded of 
their shafts. 

This rude Gaelic land of the Argyllshire coast and 



262 SCOTLAND. 

the Hebrides is known as part of the Highlands of 
Scotland, although, of course, it is on the level of the 
sea. Highland is now an ethnological rather than a 
topographical distinction. The people here, too, rude 
and meagre as is their life, have all the fierce spirit of 
freedom and the strong self-respect of the clans of the 
hills. They prove their blood. The only man, woman, 
or child in all Europe who ever refused a gratuity at 
my hands was a little Highland boy of lona, and I put 
it on record to the credit of his land. One who has 
travelled in Europe will know how much it means. 

The Scotch have certainly acquired all the world 
over an unfortunate low-grade reputation for being 
" canny,'' and canny, in the way it has come to be ap- 
plied as their national characteristic, means only self- 
ishness and cunning. It certainly, however, does not 
come from the Highlands. The Highlanders to-day 
are mostly poor, and they always have been so. They 
are not a money-making or a money-loving race, and 
they have always been 'ready to sacrifice their property 
for their principles, their reputation, or their vengeance. 

lONA. 



NORTHBRlSr ITALY. 



263 



CHAPTER XXyill. 



VENICE. 



St. Mark's Grand Grave — Gracious Influences of the 
Sea — A City Set as a Stage Scene — Street Life in 
Venice — The Lares and Penates — Church and State — 
The Sacred Birds of Venice — Venus Aphrodite. 

Venice blazons as her city arms the Lion of St. 
Mark, — the winged beast of the Apocalypse, — and the 
selection is appropriate, for in a certain sense the city 
herself is apocalyptic in being like to no other place on 
the face of the earth or in the waters under. 

This lovely city, that floats like a picture on the sea, 
is in fact and in spirit the splendid mausoleum and 
monument of St. Mark, the humble shoemaker-evan- 
gelist. They bore his remains here one thousand years 
ago from Alexandria, and his worship, the honor of his 
name, the glory of his legends, became at once the civic 
life of the town. It was a quaint, mediaeval habit, sug- 
gestive of the historic life of those times, for all the 
cities to take to themselves some saint as a local deity, 
and their existence thenceforth took life and color from 
his name and spirit, — was bound up with it. The city 
and the saint went on together when once their fortunes 
were thus joined. He prayed for his people in heaven 
above, and sometimes came down with spear and shield 
to fight their battles below. In return they glorified 
his name on earth. 

St. Mark sleeps his final rest in the grand cathedral 

which bears his name and fronts the magnificent piazza 

San Marco. The cathedral is one of the great churches 

of the world ; the piazza is unique in brilliancy and 

M 23 265 



266 NORTHERN ITALY. 

splendor and pleasing life, — a picture that, perhaps, no 
other place can offer. The whole city to-day is crested 
and carved Avith the images and legends of its patron 
saint. His lion crouches and sleeps and rears and flies 
on column and porch and palace and church and pave- 
ment, and the loyal artists of Venice have faithfully 
wrestled on canvas and in stone with the kindred beasts 
of the Apocalypse to do him company. St. Mark is 
fortunate in his apotheosis. His is the city of poetry 
and splendor. 

Just think what Venice gained over the cities of the 
earth when she was taken under the protection of the 
sea. 

No grimy locomotive, breathing smoke and soot, can 
ever go groaning and shrieking through the streets, 
leaving a trail of black dirt in its offensive rear. 

No wagons rattle and rumble, no horses clatter with 
dissonant noise, over her streets and stones. Her 
sounds are all of music. 

Washed forever by the slowly falling and rising 
waters, there is no dust in her streets or on her marble- 
floored squares: one leaves windows up as safely as in 
country groves. 

Being no dust, there is comparatively little dirt. 
Even rough work hardly soils the clothes of the toilers, 
and her gondoliers — the stable-smelling hackmen and 
cabbies of other towns — do their work to song and in 
bright, clean linen. 

Finally, the cool sea-breezes forever sweep her stones, 
and there are freshness and bracing salt air in-doors and 
out from morning till night, and till morning again. 

It is these softening and gracious influences of the 
sea on its daily life and being that give to Venice her 
peculiar charm and distinctive beauty. It has been my 
good fortune to see the city in the splendor of pure sun- 
shine by day and under the mellowing softness of moon- 
light by night. It is a picture — a dream — something 
one feels too lovely for the prosaic life of mortal men. 



VENICE. 267 

The life of all Venice converges and centres in the 
grand Square of St. Mark^s, and in the evening, — it 
seems then a perpetual scene set for the representation 
of some grand spectacular opera, only that the proper- 
ties, instead of being pasteboard, are the finest palaces 
and architecture in the world, and the music is human 
life and pleasure. You think the curtain must fall. 
It does fall towards midnight, but it rises again next 
evening. 

Imagine a vast space say in length from the Union 
Ivcague House to the Academy of Music in Philadel- 
phia, and in width perhaps three times that of Broad 
Street, paved smooth with marble and blocks of 
trachyte, shut ofiP from the noise of Avheels or horses. 
On the one side the floating domes of the great Byzan- 
tine cathedral and its grand arched fronts, with their 
golden mosaics lustrous in the night-time, on the 
other the famous Palace of the Doges, wasteful in 
magnificence ; the towering shaft of the Campanile, 
with its colonnades of white arches fluttering in the 
air, and up to whose very pinnacle you could ride a 
horse, so wonderful is the engineering of the interior 
ascent ; the three tall red mast-like spires draped with 
the colors of Italy, — columns so ancient and strange 
that tradition can hardly tell their origin, — and all 
around a continuous chain of stately marble palaces, 
stained with age and time. Imagine all this, and you 
have the faint outlines of St. Mark's piazza. Around 
three sides of the square there runs a covered archway 
lined with shops and supported by a corridor of col- 
umns, on which rest the fronts of the palaces. In the 
evening these shops are brilliantly lighted, a glittering 
line of fire encircling the piazza. In front of this cor- 
ridor of columns, when the falling shadows draw towards 
sunset, hundreds and hundreds of chairs and little tables 
are set out before the cafes. At these tables citizens 
and strangers gather in families and parties to eat ices, 
sip coflee, eau sucre, light wines, drink beer, and smoke, 



268 NORTHERN ITALY. 

children, women, old men, young, middle-aged, and all. 
In fact, Venice does its visiting at these tables, and one 
can pick out the belles of the city at a glance by the dark, 
bee-like clusters which surround their mothers' tables. 

On to this grand stage the whole city throws itself 
every evening, — all classes, all ages, all the world of 
Venice. A large military band of many pieces takes 
its station in the centre, and there is good music all 
evening for everybody, — free. In the mean while, those 
people not sitting, or who do not come to thus enjoy 
themselves, promenade under the brilliant corridors or 
down and up the long aisles formed by the masses of 
chairs, filing, passing, returning, all the evening. 
If you sit in the front rows of chairs you can see, thus 
at rest, the whole life of the city stream before you, and 
it is this scene which is so irresistibly operatic in its 
effect, — the whole town moving and living for an even- 
ing to music. 

All classes mingle and jostle, and in such a setting the 
sailors of all climes, gathered here from East and West, — 
sufficiently rough and prosaic elsewhere, here all washed 
and clean, — look like wandering tenors, disguised noble- 
men, lost heirs. There pass before you Venetian 
dames stately in black-lace veils, and demoiselles with 
wondrous blond hair and the open slipper dear to the 
heart of feminine Italy ; swarthy Lascars in white cot- 
ton ; water-girls ^^ with rings on their fingers ;" flower- 
girls (somewhat mature, — another theatrical touch) ; 
merchants of the Orient all-brilliant in slashed scarlet 
robes and fez caps; gay gondoliers in blue and white; 
the d^ bonnair officers of Italy's army in blue and 
gold ; naval officers from the ships in port of all na- 
tions; Greeks with their clear-cut cameo-like profiles ; 
beggars happy for the evening and avoiding "shop" 
for the moment as a point of honor ; the handsome men 
of Italy, lithe, active, dark ; travellers of all tongues 
and lands, labelled with red books ; and the ever-present 
British female tourist with stout boots, — all the world. 



VENICE. 269 

This is the every-niglit opera of Venice, — music, 
flowers, costumes, statuary, columns, arcaded vistas, 
moonlights, star, legended trophies, golden paintings. 
Do we wonder that, with all this luxury as an inheri- 
tance and education, the Venetian of to-day has grown 
somewhat indolent, and takes his exercise in sleeping 
in a gondola or inhaling the fragrance of a flower in 
some arched and grated palace window? 

This brilliant panorama lasts till about midnight. 
At ten o'clock the shops begin to take in their glitter- 
ing wares and close ; at half-past ten o'clock the music 
ceases, and the ladies then begin to leave. Shortly after 
eleven o'clock the place is abandoned to gentlemen. 
Then the waiters begin to stack up the chairs, the 
lights one by one go out, and shortly the dark shadows 
of the palaces fall on an empty square. 

Venice goes to bed as early as Philadelphia or Bos- 
ton or New York, and earlier than Paris or London, 
notwithstanding all the fascinations of sea-air and moon- 
light that might well tempt her to stay up all night. 
It is a commonplace of travellers, and sometimes even 
of the guide-book, yet to assert that the Venetians turn 
night into day. There was a time long ago when they 
did, when the city was powerful and rich, and was 
lived in and ruled by a class of wealthy and luxurious 
nobles. Then all this grand square was lined with 
gambling-rooms and houses of pleasure, and men ate 
and drank and played and lost their fortunes, and the 
whole place was a blaze of light until morning. 

Now, Venice, like the rest of Italy, is poor, and her 
habits are simple. One of the most marked features 
of an evening on the piazza is the innocence and ex- 
treme simplicity of the pleasures of this people. They 
will s})end a whole evening with almost no expendi- 
ture of money or movement. A tiny cup of coffee will 
last a gentleman the whole evening, and he appears to be 
always busy in its consumption. A very small saucer 
of ice or a small glass of water colored by a drop of 

23* 



270 NORTHERN ITALY. 



anisette does the same service for a lady. A single 
" pony'^ glass of beer and a two-cent cigar employ an 
officer of the army for an hour or two. I do not think 
the average visitor at these cafes spends ten cents a 
night. For this he has a table and chair all the even- 
ing, a cool seat, excellent music, the view of the prome- 
nade, the opportunity to make calls or receive visits, 
rest, conversation, moonlight, flowers. 

The flower-girls are a feature and a part of the en- 
tertainment. They circulate among the chairs with a 
basket of flowers, giving one to each gentleman for his 
button-hole and to the ladies with him. This is a gift 
oflered wnth all the coquetry and compliment in the 
vender's power. The stranger, who is addressed in 
French, returns his gift at once in money. The Vene- 
tians do not, but at intervals, and not at the tables, give 
their flower-friend some gift. She, in return, regularly 
decorates them every evening with a little bouquet. 

There is music all the evening, but, with the national 
inclination to inaction, no dancing. I have remarked 
this all over Italy. On the fete-days and in the even- 
ings in the villages there is always good instrumental 
music, but the people never dance, only move gently 
around from place to place, half walking, half standing. 

Venice's great impression is its street life, — so bril- 
liant, so highly colored, so unlike that of any other 
city. The commonplace shows of the guide-books are 
flat and disappointing, — the prisons, dungeons. Bridge 
of Sighs, and so forth. The school-girl glamour thrown 
over these places is mainly traceable, I suppose, to 
Byron's sentimental verse. 

The daily picture of all Venice, however, is some- 
thing of which one never tires, and which changes ever 
with the hour. Gondola life is something deliciously 
dreamy and luxurious in the soft light of day or under 
the sheen of moon and starlip^ht. Let dark nio^ht come 
and ram, however, and these long, narrow, deep, black 
boats, seen mysteriously from the faint point of light 



VENICE. 271 

on their prow, take to themselves the likeness of float- 
ing coffins steered by the shades. The effect is inde- 
scribably sepulcliral. You seem to be alone in the 
waters of Hades among the spirits. The gondolas are 
all of a funereal black, — painted black, carved in black, 
with black draperies over the dark cabin. Many cen- 
turies ago a Venetian law ordered this pattern and 
color, for a good reason of that time. The laws in 
Venice do not change, and the gondolas are all black 
and ghostly to this day. 

The streets are very narrow and blaze with light. 
Their narrowness — sometimes not over three feet — 
makes a very little light serve to brilliantly illuminate 
them, and the jets in the shop windows, kept open till 
late at night, keep them bright and blazing almost 
without the out-door lamps. Through them the peo- 
ple surge in constant streams, — all nations, all classes, 
all colors. You study the world, but even the Vene- 
tians themselves present some strong contrasts, for they 
in time are made up of the blood of many people. 
One striking contrast, which you soon note, is that the 
Venetian men, as a body, are dark, their women blond. 
The sounds, too, are polyglottal, and everything is 
international. Venice will likely be, for instance, the 
tourist's first experience of Greek money, which is cur- 
rent coin here. 

At every corner you come are the little shrines and 
altars to the Virgin and the saints, built in dwelling- 
houses and over the shops, with lamps burning before 
them. These bright-colored shrines, with their glass 
frames and swinging, censer-like lights, produce a very 
picturesque effect, especially when the niches are reflected 
by the water. You feel \\\i\\ a new meaning the poetry 
of the litany, Ave Maria, stella maris. Indeed, the 
sea is very gracious and beneficent to Venice, in that it 
doubles all her beauties and splendors. She has her 
stars in the heavens and under her feet, her palaces 
above the earth and under the waters. Her beautiful 



272 NORTHERN ITALY. 

bridges span their solid piers and tremble in the waves 
below them. Everything has a double form of grace 
and beauty, — a life of marble and a life of motion. 

To return to the shrines : their images are here, as 
elsewhere in Italy, the Lares and Penates of the modern 
Romans, and this domestic worship, perpetual and 
hourly, and the devotion and love and apparent faith 
of the homely service, is something very pleasing and 
touching. It is only a pleasant illusion, however. 
The cultus of these shrines is, I fear, but an inherited 
habit, — a custom, a usage, — not an intelligent act. I 
regret to say that no amount of shrines or altars in an 
Italian shop will prevent your being shamelessly treated 
there. I do not think a Madonna on the very counter 
of daily fraud would protect you. 

In Venice they sell fresh water on the streets in 
bottles and by the glass, and people are constantly 
drinking it. I have not seen so much water-drinking 
in all Europe, and the habit seems to be a confirmed 
one. There may be an useful hint for temperance 
societies in this little fact. 

The cathedral church of St. Mark is perhaps the 
central architectural feature of Venice; at all events, it 
divides the honor with the rich Palace of the Doges. 
It is the great triumph of Romano-Byzantine archi- 
tecture, and in its profusion of ornament and wealth 
of decoration mingles the splendors of two civilizations, 
— of the East and of the West. In its shrines are 
the most precious workmanship of Constantinople, 
costly gems, rare marbles of Europe, pillars from the 
temple of Solomon. Under the great altar rests the 
stolen body of St. Mark. Its treasury of relics contains 
some of the most precious memorials of faith, — a piece 
of the head of St. John, a fragment of the sacred 
column of the Passion, a vial of the blood of Christ. 
Its pictures of the masters and its old statues teach 
tradition, history, and religion to the people, whose 
thronging, treading feet for centuries have worn the 



VENICE. 273 

marbles of its floors uneven and fluctuatino; like the 
waves ot the sea. It is a temple, — an eternal monu- 
ment and lesson to Venice. 

In the vestibule of this cathedral, itself a stately 
hall larger and grander than most of the churches of 
our country, they show three great red, flat stones, 
forming a broad stairway, as the spot of the historic 
reconciliation between the Emperor Frederick Barba- 
rossa and Pope Alexander III., an affair in which the 
conciliation, as was the fashion of those times, was all 
on one side. "iVb?i tibi sed Petro" (" Not to you, but 
to St. Peter"), said the dishonored emperor Avhen he 
knelt, probably feeling that he was doing something 
wrong, although he may not have known how great 
was the magnitude of the trust he was betraying, and 
which he had better have died to protect. ''' Ilihi et 
Petroi'^ {" To me and Peter"), said the modest pope. 

And so it is everywhere in Europe. There is hardly 
a great church on the Continent which, in some shape 
or other, in painting or marble or brass or ostentatious 
relic, does not contain some deliberate and insolent 
affront to the civil authority, — some perpetual assertion 
of the claim of Rome to supreme political powder. St. 
Peter's, the first church of the world, is full of them, 
and they are repeated so systematically everywhere 
that their presence seems to be the result of a policy 
and an order. Remember that in Europe the churches 
are the common schools of the people, who frequent 
them daily from childhood, studying their ])ictures, 
carvings, statues, bronzes, columns, and receiving their 
first and most lasting impressions from them. I do not 
wonder any more at Bismarck^s relentless and uncom- 
promising warfare on the ecclesiastical organization of 
Rome. I only wonder that any strong men who have 
ever attempted to found a state or been intrusted with 
the keeping of the civil liberties of the people have not 
made the same war, and made it more bitterly. 

Every one knows the story of the civic pigeons of 



274 NORTHERN IT ALT. 

Venice, and meets them like old acquaintances when 
he goes there ; and the birds meet all the world in the 
same way. They belong to history and legend, and 
have been translated from their lower life and taken 
into the fellowship of men. Within an hour of my 
coming one of these pigeons looked in at my window 
facing on the grand piazza, and after a few moments^ 
cautious reconnoitring was trustingly and fearlessly 
feeding from my hand. Seeing what was going on, a 
whole flock came swiftly trooping in from all sides, en- 
tirely bankrupting my limited commissariat provision 
in a moment or two. 

Many hundreds of years ago some pigeons "assisted" 
at a great victory had by the Venetians over Candia, 
I think, by carrying very important despatches. The 
victorious general sent them home with the news of his 
triumph, and grateful Venice adopted the birds as the 
" wards of the nation." To this time their descendants 
are fed every day in the great square of St. Mark, at 
the expense of the city, and no one in Venice ever 
touches a pigeon. They rest at night in the eaves of 
the palaces and the cornices of the great cathedral, on 
triumphal columns and arches, and in the airy arcades 
of the campanili. They nestle with the winged lions 
and dart noiselessly through the churches. They brush 
the sacred altars and the tombs of kings and doges and 
bishops. They walk the marble pavements in groups 
and in hundreds, unmolested among throngs of passers. 
They play with the children and fly up on to your caf§ 
table for their share of the cake or water. They do 
just what all other birds and animals would do if man 
only treated them with humanity, — but gave them their 
"civil rights." 

Venice is a mirror in which you study the influence 
of the sea on the human race, — on its physical, political, 
and intellectual development. It has conditioned and 
determined the physical appearance, the daily life, the 
history, the art, of this people. 



VENICE. 275 

They were sailors, of course, and became a naval 
power, and their whole outside history and political 
relations started from that point and have been condi- 
tioned by it for ten centuries. The cleanliness and ease 
of trans})ortation induced luxury and magnificence, a 
wealth of coloring and costume, which the daily life of 
no other city could support. One can go anywhere 
over Venice in a soft dress shoe. The pavements are 
smooth as floors and spotless, the gondolas are car- 
peted. The protection to dress is as great out-doors as 
in. The gorgeous costumes of Titian and Tintoretto 
and the Venetian school are but the legitimate develop- 
ment of the social life of a class of nobles in a city built 
as this is, and drawing on both the Orient and the Oc- 
cident for treasures of sumptuousness, luxury, and dis- 
play. Their pictures, of course, breathe the luxurious 
and color-loving spirit of their time, for they, too, are 
part of its development, but they are also portraits, 
faithful copies of the very picture of the city. 

More directly in the famous glass of Venice you see 
imprisoned the elusive colors of the sea itself. Art has 
simply taken its lesson from the waves. 

Again, the moment you enter this town you meet 
everywhere, at random among all classes, perhaps most 
noticeably among the poorer, that beautiful female face 
which is the glory of Venice, and which her painters 
have made immortal, — a soft sea-shell complexion of 
delicate loveliness, Titian eyes, and a wealth of golden 
blond hair, — a kind of Venus Aphrodite face. It is 
the sea again. 

And so you may trace endlessly its visible influence 
here at every turn and every way you look. The old 
traditional ceremony of state when the new Doge, on 
behalf of Venice, in solemn form, celebrates its nuptials 
with the sea and casts into its waters the wedding-ring, 
is something more than a legend. It is history and 
fact. Venice — the Venetian race — is the child of Man 
by the Sea. 



276 NORTHERN ITALY, 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

GENOA. 

The Great Dead and the Little Living — Five Hundred 
Years without Sunlight — The Cross of Malta — 
Poverty, Want, and Wretchedness that we call the 
Picturesque — Priests and Soldiers — San Lorenzo — • 
An Italian Sunday-School — The Practical Side of 
the Italians — Eailway Management — The Marble 
Wealth. 

A SORT of dreamy listlessness falls over one in Genoa, 
which it is hard to define, and harder still to resist. 
The weight of the centuries seems to come down, and 
repress individual action or vigor by dwarfing its 
results in contrasting them with the movements of 
ages. Men have lived on this spot — in this town — for 
twenty-five hundred years of recorded history; have 
worked, loved, fought, died. What is one human 
atom, however brilliant his momentary position or 
achievement, in all the vast stream of life ! 

I think this feeling must unconsciously oppress this 
people, and bar the way to that individual energy and 
vigor whose sum makes human progress. At all 
events, they act so. For thousands of years life has 
gone on quietly or stormily, and the Genoese of to-day 
live and act as if they had thousands of years yet to 
come, and a day, a week, or year was of no account. 
Why hurry, with whole centuries yet of time ? 

For this very reason, perhaps, Genoa is such a 
picturesque and pleasing city. Spared largely from 
the destructive rush of travel, it preserves somewhat 
of its mediaeval flavor, and retains the charm of dis- 
tinctive sight and sound which all European cities are 
losing so fast. 



GENOA. 277 

It is bard to describe Genoa and its unique life and 
ways to tbe American mind used to regularity and 
construction. You live bere from tradition ; your 
houses, your streets, are all banded down from cen- 
turies. You only accept tbera ; you are not responsi- 
ble for tbem or expected to account for tliem. There 
is no city surveyor with a whole digest of brand-new 
municipal ordinances. No two streets run parallel, and 
no one street runs for any length in one direction. No 
two houses stand on the same line. No wall even stands 
perpendicular. The windows appear where they have 
a mind to ; the doors are mere holes in tbe wall at any 
place, behind a buttress or around an angle. I chose 
for my temporary residence "the Hotel of the Cross 
of Malta,'' an old historic pile, consecrated as the head- 
quarters, hundreds of years ago, of the Knights of 
Malta, who gathered here to plan their campaigns and 
embark for the Holy Land. Hardly any two rooms 
have exactly the same level. The floors are hopelessly 
involved, and strange doors tempt you to mysterious 
passages at every corner. The place is yet lordly in 
its lowered uses. Corridors of marble stairways lined 
with exotic plants and flowers greet your entrance. 
You dine and read and smoke in noble rooms twenty 
feet high, frescoed by great artists, and whose walls 
are heavy with historic pictures. Statues of great men 
in bronze and marble look down on you from pedestals 
and niches at every turn. As a matter of fact, Scipio 
Africanus was the first figure which met my eyes as I 
entered this hotel, and he presided, grave and thought- 
ful, Avhile I watched the transfer of my baggage and 
bargained for rooms. 

This communion of the great dead with the little 
living is a feature of Italy. At the railway depot in 
Turin I awaited the lazy pleasure of the custom-house 
officials in a magnificent hall thirty feet high, frescoed 
with lovely Cupids and grotesque Bacchuses, larger 
than life, lit with clusters of handsome chandeliers, and 

24 



278 NORTHERN ITALY. 

paved with marble. The other side of the picture was 
that this ducal palace of a depot was cold and chilly. 
But one-sixteenth of the jets were lighted, and the 
place was so dismally gloomy you could hardly read 
your ticket. A guard stood at each door of this room, 
and at every possible entrance or doorway in the really 
vast station-building, and effectually prevented any 
rapidity of movement. 

The streets of old Genoa range from three feet to 
twenty in width. Of course, sunlight never strikes 
the flagstones of the three-feet avenues. They must 
be delightful summer resorts, but at this time are rather 
chilly, even when some parts of the town are bright 
with warm sunshine and redolent with exotic perfumes. 
My own room in this aristocratic old hotel has proba- 
bly never seen the sunshine for five hundred years. 
When I want sunlight I do as I suppose the old 
Knights of Malta did, — go out and find it on the hills 
or open piazzas, where the Genoese eat confections and 
drink the Falernian wines so thoroughly advertised by 
Horace. 

In these narrow streets, which close in on each other 
like Colorado canons, and where the houses, which, 
kept at a formal distance on the first floor, kiss each 
other at the roofs, fountains splash dreamily all day, 
and the venders of small wares transact their business 
in song, exactly as in the representation of an opera. 
All day long and far into the night tenor, baritone, and 
chorus snatches float into my room, now swelling, now 
dying away in faint echoes. It is the work of Genoa, 
the rhythmic labor of Italy, the chant of the poor peo- 
ple working hard for their daily macaroni. It does 
not seem to us as if work thus set to music and carried 
on by refrain could be very onerous, and perhaps it is 
not; although it is certainly ceaseless, but it does not 
matter much. There is very little work to do, and very 
many to do it, and the man who hurried through a day^s 
work in an hour would only be idle the rest of the day. 



GENOA. 279 

Out of the window just opposite mine, and only a 
few feet from it, all day long there lolls an Italian girl, 
beautiful, dirty, lazy, badly dressed, and always eating 
something. Priest and soldier and beggar and donkey 
and tourist and sailor flow on beneath in a steady 
stream to slow music. She gazes listlessly on the hu- 
man current forever, but takes no human interest in it, 
and shows signs of intelligent life but about once every 
half-hour, when she retires to a cupboard to fill her 
pockets again with cake. It is Italy, — only the bulk of 
the people do not have cake, and get along with garlic. 

There is everything in Genoa to make the place 
quaint and grotesque. Not only do the dark and nar- 
row streets refuse to run anywhere with certainty, and 
curve and wind and twist with lal)yrinthine complex- 
ity, but they run under and over each other. Occa- 
sionally a great church tower or spire serves as a land- 
mark or beacon for a few minutes, but it, too, is soon 
lost behind a hill or under some huge mediaeval wall, 
and the situation is more hopeless than ever. It is 
useless to attempt to know the streets or find one's way. 
The Genoese do it by tradition, but for a stranger it is 
lost time." \Yhen I go out I only walk and walk and 
walk among sights and sounds ever new and shifting, 
and when I am tired hire a small boy or a large man 
— it is immaterial which — to lead me back to my hotel. 
This service, from boy or man, costs exactly five mills. 
In fact, five mills is a very respectable sum here, and 
with a pocket full of copper centesimi one feels rather 
princely. 

In truth, it is very sad to see what a copper coin 
will do in Italy. It is the only money many of the 
people ever see. I have had small shopkeepers refuse 
to take gold because they did not know what it was. 
We in America — in Colorado, Nevada, and California 
— decline daily to take in change the sums which 
would support a poor Italian in comparative comfort. 
Could there be any stronger contrast ? 



280 NORTHERN ITALY. 

In fact, amid all the quaintness and picturesque effect 
of Italy, so pleasing to the passing stranger, it is a de- 
pressing reflection ever recurring that it is all the result 
and evidence of an awful poverty, ---a poverty which 
the average American is so fortunate that he cannot 
comprehend. For the unhappy Italian, however, of 
the lower class, it is his only inheritance and the only 
legacy he can hope to leave his children. Yet, withal, 
he sings through life like the plantation negro of 
American tradition, but his song, as the slave's was, is 
largely a moan, a minor monotone like the endless cur- 
rent of the ocean. Better a thousand times the crude, 
prosaic comfort of our prairie settler than the poetic 
squalor of Italy,— the hopeless slavery of misery and 
want. 

It is strange, however, how the result of centuries of 
ignorance and poverty and oppression is to make a land 
outwardly picturesque and beautiful. In all Genoa 
there is hardly a point from which every view is not a 
picture. You stand anywhere in the old streets, turn 
in any direction, and you wish you had the painter's 
pencil. There is a poetic effect of the lines of the 
buildings as well as in the movement and pose of the 
people, and when you add the skies of Italy and the 
fruits, flowers, and perfumes of the Mediterranean, life 
is a poem, and you feel as if it might be better to live 
here in bodily poverty than to exist elsewhere under 
colder suns and a less sympathetic nature. 

Nevertheless, this loveliness is all on the outside. 
An army of priests hold the land in spiritual subjec- 
tion, and heavy siege-guns frown on all the walls. 
Genoa, in fact, is a huge fortress, compared with which 
our heaviest fortifications in war times were but toys. 
Here, as all over Europe, you see heavy artillery 
mounted in the parks, sweeping the beautiful fields 
and the busy streets. Between cathedrals and cannon 
the people have had a poor chance, and their condition 
after centuries of this kind of guardianship proves it. 



GENOA. 281 

Cardinal Wiseman, in his writings of years ago, 
claimed especial credit for Italy on the point of her 
free schools, — conducted by the Church, of course. 
Last Sunday I saw in several churches Avhat we would 
call a Sabbath-school, and the sight was so novel and 
different from our own that I thought its description 
would be interesting. 

Hearing music in the cathedral church of San 
Lorenzo — the great church here — as I was passing it 
about four o'clock in the afternoon, I entered. It was 
so dark you could hardly distinguish human figures at 
first, the wax lights being mere fire-flies in the vast 
vaulted arches, and the long rows of columns interfer- 
ing with even their feeble light. Slowly the eye, how- 
ever, adjusted itself, the shadowy forms became visible, 
and one could find his way about. Some fifty priests 
and choristers were chanting a low, wailing music, and 
with them, out of recesses from every side and aisle, 
joined the voices of the congregation. The service 
here is, so far as I have seen, largely congregational, 
and the Italians being good singers^ the effect is artis- 
tically pleasing, as well as devotional. 

During this service, which was just closing, I dis- 
covered that a general interest seemed to centre in the 
middle of the church, where a crowd was gathered. 
Moving over to it, I found some thirty children ranged 
on two lines of rude wooden benches, facing inwards. 
At .each end on chairs, and facing each other, sat two 
teachers, elderly gentlemen of benign countenance and 
in priestly vestments. Around the children, who were 
all of the poorer class, knelt or stood a crowd of their 
relatives and friends, their mothers, their grandparents, 
their sisters, their cousins, and their kindly neighbors. 
Some private soldiers in uniform were among the 
group, and other soldiers, with their swords on, were 
kneeling praying near us. A vender of soap and 
matches had brought in his basket of wares and knelt 
by it, praying half audibly. Three ladies, well dressed 

24* 



282 NORTHERN ITALY. 

and of Italian face and figure, came in, took the group 
in at a glance, casting a momentary look of curiosity 
at the foreign-dressed stranger, and then dropped down 
on their knees in the outskirts of the crowd, with their 
backs to it, however, and facing some minor altar, and 
in a moment were deeply absorbed in their own prayers. 
Near by, a black-eyed baby was dabbling its little hand 
in the holy-water fountain, its sister and nurse, a laugh- 
ing girl of about fifteen, trying to teach it to cross itself 
properly. 

As the singing ceased and the altar force marched 
out in procession — an ecclesiastical military company 
— the teaching began. The children stood up and 
answered such questions as were put to them. There 
were no books used. One of the teachers seemed to be 
a superior of some kind inspecting the work, and what 
was probably the stated teacher frequently prompted 
his pupils. In answer to some question, one of the 
little ones made some reply which I did not under- 
stand. Both the priests, or teachers, smiled kindly, 
and a good-natured laugh broke out from the entire 
crowd. This crowd, some kneeling, some sitting on 
the floor, some standing, as was easiest, and a number 
of them women with infants in their arms, took the 
liveliest interest in what was going on. A murmur 
of applause often rewarded some of the children for 
good and ready answers, and when a child could not 
answer or was confused, a look of mortification and 
wounded pride always came over the little group of 
friends and supporters at its back. 

The instruction was thoroughly conversational and 
kindly, but intelligent and earnest. The scene was 
picturesque and pretty, and you felt the work was 
doing good. You could not but wonder, however, at 
its small scope compared with the population and the 
dignity of the machinery. Genoa is a town of over 
one hundred and sixty thousand souls. San Lorenzo 
is its cathedral. Attached to this cathedral there is 



GENOA. 283 

an ecclesiastical force which no Protestant church ever 
has, yet the Bethany Sunday-school in Philadelpliia 
every Sunday brings more children under instruction 
than are taught in ail Genoa for a month, if last Sunday 
was any metre. There were about thirty in the 
cathedral, and from forty to fifty more in each of two 
other churches I visited. 

There is something inexplicable to us in the devo- 
tion of the Latin mind. No incongruity of outward 
circumstances seems to disturb or aifect it. There is 
no consciousness of sight, sound, or smell when once 
the Italian drops down to pray. Things that would 
aifect us as physically intolerable, or that we would 
resent as profane intrusion, they do not seem to be even 
conscious of. Children play on the floors and creep 
around among the groups of worshippers, or right 
under the pulpit, while the priest is preaching. Men 
and women come and go, mutter half-audible prayers, 
kneel and pray in all directions, facing the altar of 
their choice; but as long as there is no very loud noise 
and intentional display of irreverence, it seems to dis- 
turb no one. We would insist on better outward order 
at a political meeting. 

In this beautiful and picturesque city, where every 
view is a scene striking with arches and terraces and 
statuary and ruined walls; where the air is redolent 
with the perfumes of almond and magnolia and orange; 
where brilliant flowers flash from half-concealed gardens 
and droop down from balconies and towers ; where 
light-hearted people, clad in the brightest of colors, go 
singing all the day long; where the altars of the 
churches are set with stage effect, and in them music 
rolls and surges from morning to night; where the 
streets, crowded with priests and soldiers in contrasting 
uniforms, with ragged muleteers and laughing children, 
present the effect of a continuous carnival, you cannot 
for the life of you avoid the feeling that the whole 
thing is a play, an elaborate and well-produced opera, 



284 NORTHERN ITALY. 

whose scenic effects will dissolve, and whose music will 
hush with the near tinkling of the call-bell as the cur- 
tain drops. Nevertheless, these people have been living 
this life for centuries, and their fathers, who were like 
them, have done some great things. The Italians of 
to-day are great grown-up children. They have the 
happy carelessness of children and their outward aban- 
don, — their love for the beautiful, their enjoyment of 
the moment, their unselfish kindness and sympathy. 

It is hard for us, perhaps, to understand them or 
give them due credit for what they can do. With all 
their immense superiority to us in politeness, in 
thoughtfulness and personal culture, they reveal, at 
times, a practical side which, under equal conditions, 
might prove them to be our equals in even that practi- 
cal development of which we are so. proud, and which 
exists with us along with so much of coarseness and 
vulgarity. They have an excellent and efficient army, 
the result of discipline and organization. Their rail- 
ways are so much better administered than those of 
France that you feel the difference the moment you 
cross the border. • I have not often been in a better- 
managed or more thoroughly well-ordered hotel than 
that in which I write to-day, and regret to leave to- 
morrow. In all these matters of physical achievement 
they are our equals. In the higher culture of mind 
and heart, in the thousand amenities of life which 
make human association pleasant and agreeable, they 
are immeasurably our superiors. 

In all their common life they carry out the desire to 
please in a wonderful manner. The railway depot at 
this place, for instance, is not an altered palace, as are 
many public buildings here, but was built by the com- 
pany for its own use. Its conception, however, is not 
that of a shed as is the conventional American mam- 
moth depot. It is a noble hall. You sit in waiting- 
rooms twenty-five feet high or more, frescoed and 
panelled with excellent painting, and the front of the 



GENOA. 285 

building, in tlie effect of its rich carvings and marble 
columns, is more imposing than the Academies of Music 
and opera-houses of our large cities. It is, too, very 
spacious, thoroughly well arranged and adapted for its 
special use. In many of the banks and buildings for 
business offices you find interior courts of most artistic 
effect, well lighted, warm with rich flowers, cool and 
musical with sparkling fountains, and elaborate with 
carving and statuary. 

As it is a gateway into Italy, one of the most striking 
impressions of Genoa is the profusion of statuary and 
carving which here begins to meet you. Most of the 
old palaces have fine work on the fronts, and it be- 
comes more elaborate and imposing inside, where mag- 
nificent halls and massive stairways, w4iose entrance 
is very frequently a pair of colossal, crouching lions, 
lead from room to room and floor to floor. In the 
streets, the very walls of the common houses, particu- 
larly at the corners and over the doorways, at odd 
angles and in curious niches over little shops you find 
the images of an innumerable army of saints, the effi- 
gies often set up in the fashion • of a little altar. 
Through the hotels and banks, and public buildings 
of every kind, are the statues of great men, modern 
and old. All this besides the churches and parks and 
cemeteries and public gardens, which are crowded with 
rare and costly w^orks. It is this wealth of marble, 
pure and white, and shaped with exquisite art, that has 
justly won for this city its well-merited title, "Genoa 
la Superba.^* 

Genoa. 



286 NORTHERN ITALY. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

PISA. 

Entering into Tuscany — Tuscan Civilization — Quattro 
Fabbriche — The Civic Kepublics — National Baptis- 
tries — GrROTESQUE CaRVING AND ErESCOES — ThE ArTIST'S 

License in the Cathedrals — Pisa of History and or 
To-dat. 

At Pisa you enter on the Tuscan civilization, the 
glory of modern Italy, — and modern here means the 
last thousand years, for these Italians were learaed and 
accomplished people when our Saxon forefathers were 
rude savages, — when England was a forest filled wnth 
warring tribes, and the Howards were " hog-wards.^' 
It was to Italy that Milton came for travel and polite 
education when his own country was so rude that it 
was a question whether to write for it in its own tongue. 
It was from Italy that Shakespeare borrowed plots and 
thoughts when he would seek a higher plane of civili- 
zation than Tudor England afforded. In fact, until 
within a very brief time English literature has regularly 
fed from the crumbs of the table of Italy. It has been 
the school of letters, manners, and art for the modern 
world. 

Pisa is a railway junction where five roads centre. 
This is equivalent to about ten in the United States, 
and consequently the traveller need take no thought of 
how to get there. Pie will be coming to it all the time, 
and can always have half a day there and will often 
be forced to stop over several hours. Happily the 
railway restaurant is very good, carriages abound at a 
franc or two an hour, and the wonderful Quattro Fab- 
briche are very near. Time need never hang heavily 
on one's hands, and the beautiful cathedral, with its 



PISA. 287 

close of glittering white architecture, looks handsomer 
every time it is seen. 

Pisa itself is rather a modern-looking town com- 
pared with many of Tuscany. It has no city gates, for 
instance, nor massive encircling walls, but lies open on 
the plains, while at Sienna, Orvieto, Rome itself, and 
many others you enter through huge gates, with 
ponderous doors which swing heavily open or shut, 
and are in real use. At Rome the gates remain open 
until toward midnight, but in some of the country 
towns they close at eight or nine o'clock ; and once shut 
for the night they never open till morning. Should 
any one linger without until after this hour he stays out. 
Fortunately there is little outside of the walls of an Ital- 
ian town to tempt a stranger either to ramble or linger. 

It happens for the ease and instruction of tourist and 
student that all that is best in Pisa is summed up in 
the celebrated Four Buildings, which are grouped in 
one spot, — a miniature quadrilateral of architecture, — 
and which, taken together, afford an admirable intro- 
ductory study of Tuscan art and architecture, as they 
are representative and finished specimens of the style. 

These buildings are the great Cathedral of Pisa, the 
famous Leaning Tower, which is a detached tower of 
exquisite symmetry, raised for the purpose of swinging 
the cathedral bells; a huge Baptistry, and a walled 
Holy Field, or cemetery. All the buildings are of pure 
white marble, of faultless design and masterly finish, 
and together constitute a group which is without equal 
in the world. They illustrate well, too, the wealth 
which, in the Middle Ages, was lavished on church- 
buildings, and the splendor and elaborateness of their 
establishment. Of this splendid group, each one of 
which is a masterpiece, taking rank among the great 
buildings of the world, the Cathedral is, of course, the 
centre; all the others are mere adjuncts to it. 

The Leaning Tower, or Campanile, is simply a de- 
tached belfry. This was the customary way of build- 



288 NORTHERN ITALY. 

ing them in the Middle Ages. There are many such 
in Italy, and one, at least, is now extant in England, — 
at Elstow. The Baptistry is a colossal font under its 
own separate building. It was a mediseval usage that 
all the baptisms in the Republic should take place, not 
in the several churches, but at the Cathedral. Hence 
arose rather a necessity for a separate building for this 
special use, and very naturally an imposing provision 
for the rite. Specimens of these national fonts remain 
at Florence and Pistoja. The Campo Santo is but a 
graveyard, but this one is walled with costly statuary, 
and the burial-ground made with numberless shiploads 
of earth brought from Jerusalem. At Florence there 
is the same magnificent equipment for the cathedral 
church there, — the Campanile, — a square tower, rank- 
ing as the first of its kind in the world. 

And when this wonderful endowment of a single 
cathedral is considered, it must be remembered, too, 
that Pisa is a small place. It has but twenty-six thou- 
sand inhabitants, and is the centre of a district of about 
fifty thousand people only. Nevertheless, the Pisans, al- 
though a little, have been a mighty people. They were 
great soldiers and sailors in their day, and their physical 
energy was always animated by the force of education 
and high culture. There was, therefore, little of lost 
power in their development, and thus they carried their 
arms into all parts of the world, and their name into 
history. At one time they dominated Italy, and through 
it the world, displaying military and executive genius 
of the highest kind. The Bonaparte family was of 
Tuscan descent, and although Napoleon came on the 
field when the glory of Pisa was but tradition, he 
seems to have only gathered up and renewed in himself 
what was once a common inheritance of Tuscan blood. 

It is no wonder, therefore, that the Pisans are proud 
of their city and its history. Indeed, Italian history, 
up to to-day, is but the record of a brilliant constella- 
tion of civic republics. There has never been a na- 



PISA. 289 

tional growth. Its life has been municipal, and there- 
fore limited. This spirit exists yet. The Pisan, the 
Genoese, the Venetian, the Milanese look on each other 
as foreigners. They hav^e been fighting with each 
other for a thousand years, and Italian unity to-day is, 
therefore, a conception rather than a growth. The 
Pisan's instinctive allegiance is to Pisa, the Genoese to 
Genoa, just as with us tlie Virginian's first impulse is 
to Virginia, the Carolinian's to Carolina. The greater 
idea of a nation is yet to come. Moreover, our State 
rights doctrine is but the fruit of a hundred years of 
rude, provincial existence. The city independence and 
individuality of Italy is the growth of a thousand years 
of culture, power, and glorious tradition. We must 
recognize this historic fact when we would appreciate 
properly the wonderful political ability which has brought 
about the unification of Italy and made it a nation. 

The Pisa of to-day sleeps in rest and beauty after 
the toil and achievement of centuries. A summer's 
sunlight floods the town, and the calm of the clear 
Arno spreads from street to street. The quiet of a 
New England Sunday broods over the place, and the 
picturesque inhabitants, poor but robed with a Tuscan 
wealth of color, hardly seem to move. They stand 
around like artistically-grouped figures in tableaux. 
Indeed, the worship of the tortoise seems to have pre- 
vailed at Pisa at some time. On the bronze doors of 
this church, rich in rare and costly work, the tortoise 
figures again and again, the legend, " taixlo sed tuto/^ 
engraven over his elaborately-recorded exploits. It is 
hard always to trace in their time-stained and quaint 
figures the incidents of the long story, but the bottom 
of a door generally winds up with a complacent, self- 
satisfied tortoise, sitting or sleeping calmly some paces 
in advance of a very demoralized and apologetic-look- 
ing stag. In the shop-windows, too, all over the town 
are alabaster and marble figures of the contented deity. 

What the legend may be I do not know, but the moral 

N t 25 



290 NORTHERN ITALY. 

has worked its way into the life of Pisa. The worship 
has had fruition, and the Pisan of to-day has been 
absorbed into the soul of his divinity. 

On entering Italy one immediately begins to come 
on traces of that singular marriage of impiety and 
religion which so strongly characterizes the Middle 
Ages. A traveller tells of finding in an old shop a 
solid carved crucifix of costly work and worn and 
stained by long use. On touching a concealed spring 
there shot out from the long arm of the cross a mur- 
derous knife. It is mediaeval Italy all over. It was 
in this town of Pisa, I think, that a verger, unlocking 
the chancel -railings, took me to the rear of the great 
altar and showed a nude Eve, of life-size, tempted by 
the serpent. The picture was a fine painting, but so 
impure and suggestive that it was considerately kept 
covered where only priests could study it. 

This shameless profanation of the churches, which is 
not uncommon, seems to have been, in part, owing to a 
singular license enjoyed by the builders and artists, who 
were allowed to carve or paint almost anything they 
pleased, and who used this freedom to its widest stretch. 
Often their work took the form of satire, often it is 
merely grotesque and vulgar. Sometimes the entire 
meaning is lost for us. On a famous church door at 
Verona there is carved a figure of a pig clad in priestly 
canonicals and reading out of a breviary. In the judg- 
ment-hall at Pistoja, facing the seat of the judges, there 
is a fox robed in the judicial ermine. Much of this 
satire is coarse in the extreme, even to obscenity, but, 
after reading the literary efforts in this direction of Eras- 
mus, who was a polished and cultivated man of his 
time, one need not be surprised at anything from 
unknown and nameless lampooners. 

What is stranger to our sense is the use of the cathe- 
dral for such purposes. It was, evidently, the Punch 
or Puch of those ages, where, among saints and angels 
and by noble tombs, the comic artists of the day carved 



PISA. 291 

their satire, their censure, and their fun ; and all of it 
very rough to our gentler life. That there were some 
limits to this strange license is seen in the fact that 
these odd extravagances are generally partly hidden,' 
being, as a rule, found in dark recesses or under the 
capitals of columns, or only traceable with difficulty in 
the secondary lines of frescos, and not visible at all, 
perhaps, to the careless observer. A favorite field for 
these grotesque carvings is under the carved seats of 
the stalls in the choir. 

Although sleeping in a century that has no more 
meaning for it, Pisa itself, outside of its marble wonders, 
is a place full of quiet beauty and picturesque attraction 
for the American stranger. Here, travelling from the 
North, he, probably for the first time, comes on a town 
where all society is strictly classed, and the classi- 
fication emphasized by uniforms on the street. The 
women are all dark and beautiful in their black lace 
and veils. The priests are those of Northern Italy, 
intellectual in their countenances and looking clean 
and gentlemanly in their black-silk stockings and 
silver shoebuckles, — alas, how different from their 
Southern brothers ! The gentlemen w^ear cloaks in 
brigand fashion. The laboring-men are picturesque 
in clean blue blouses, and their wives in all the bright 
colors of the rainbow. Then comes the army, the 
handsome infantry-officers in soft blue and white, and 
the swaggering hersaglieri (sharpshooters) in their 
rolling bandit hats and plumes of black-cock feathers. 

In the great cathedral at Pisa hangs a massive bronze 
lamp — a group of four figures suspended at a vast 
distance from the ceiling — which, tradition says, gave 
Galileo the hint of the pendulum. It is not an eccle- 
siastical relic, but is a shrine of a good deal of interest. 
My guide told me, with only half-repressed irritation, 
that the English people always asked after it, and he 
seemed to regard this conduct as an eccentricity hardly 
excusable, even in the barbarian forestieri. I think he 



292 NORTHERN ITALY. 

knew the whole history of Galileo, and considered him 
yet a dangerous man. But, in spite of his qualms of 
conscience, he had learned that not an altar in all the 
cathedral was so prolific of barbarian fees. So he took 
the heretic silver, and balanced his account Avith an 
extra prayer or two. 

The corridors of grand pillars in this splendid house 
of God are trophies of war brought away by the Pisans 
in their conquests in many lands when Pisa was mis- 
tress of the seas and her ships brought tribute from 
almost every foreign "shore. The cathedral itself is a 
monument in honor of a great naval victory had near 
Palermo, and most of the churches commemorate 
triumph by sea or land against Turk or rival Italian 
cities. The idea of building a church as the monument 
of a field of blood is something that has passed out of 
our American civilization. We could hardly consecrate 
a cathedral of Gettysburg or a church of the Holy 
Field of Shiloh, or dedicate an altar to Our Lady of 
Stone Piver, but all Europe is full of just such monu- 
ments. And they could build their temples with pil- 
laged columns and marbles, adorn them with plundered 
statues, and, if need be, sanctify the altar with the 
stolen body of an apostle. 



SIENA. 293 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

SIEXA. 

An Enchanted Town of the Middle Ages — A Living 
Tomb of the Past — The Fourteenth Century in the 
Nineteenth— A Medieval Survival — Siena's Grand 
Cathedral— A Broad-Church Temple— The Vanished 
Sibyls Sleeping with the Saints — Socrates and Hermes 
Enshrined in A Christian Pantheon — The Golden Age 
OF Tuscany — The Lost Kepublics of Italy — And We 
Too? 

All through the interior of Italy there are interest- 
ing cities — towns of from fifteen thousand to forty 
thousand inhabitants — which are more striking in 
tlieir general effect than Rome, or Genoa, or Naples, or 
Milan, or any of the cities of travel, and more really 
instructive in the way of picturing vividly the mediaeval 
life of Europe. These towns have been kept unspotted 
from the world. The eager currents of modern life 
have never poured through them, and they stand the 
spared monuments of ages gone by. 

Of all this group of quaint towns, there is none more 
curious or picturesquely representative than Siena, — a 
name which is to many, perhaps, only a vague recol- 
lection, the faint memory of a footnote in some history 
of art or dictionary of dates. Nevertheless, it w^as once 
a grand factor in European history, — a centre of art 
and civil freedom which died out together; then a 
theatre of fierce passions, intestinal Avars, tragedies, 
tyrannies, and endless and bloody revolutions; then 
the lifeless quiet of exhaustion. 

As the modern railway carries you out of the dreary 
sepulchre of the Roman Campagna, and into the gar- 
landed and smiling fields of Tuscany, that pleasing 
land flowing with oil and wine, you see afar oft* what 

25* 



294 NORTHERN ITALY. 

seems to be a huge fortress, throwing out its battle- 
mented turrets sharply against the sky. As you draw 
nearer the heavy walls lengthen and broaden and 
divide into the lines of a town. It is Siena, — a solid 
mass of masonry set on the steep, sharp crest of a hill 
bristling with bastions and frowning towers. Nearly 
all of the mediaeval towns are so placed. They were 
simply fortified camps, and in times when warfare w^as 
carried on by hand-weapons the natural site of a fixed 
camp was the highest hilltop in the neighborhood. 
From that point it commanded all the country in sight. 
This was the origin of the castle, — castellum meaning, 
etymologically, a little camp, — and in time, by the law 
of the survival of the fittest, the best-located castle be- 
came the city. 

As a consequence of this hilltop location, the rail- 
ways in Central Italy usually do not go into any town, 
the grades being simply impossible, but land you at a 
depot bearing the town name, and sometimes some four 
miles away from it. The hill itself is often shaved 
down on all sides, so that its native rock may form not 
only the foundation, but part of the outer walls, of the 
town which crowns its crest. The smooth face of this 
wall may thus be one hundred feet in perpendicular 
height, and one often cannot tell what part is built 
masonry and what part natural rock. 

In the case of Siena it is a little better. The train, 
by a powerful effort, backs up a zigzag something like 
the celebrated approach to the great St. Louis bridge 
in our country, and lands you within a mile of the 
town. 

At this outside depot you are received in state. The 
daily ceremony of going to this station, by which Siena 
touches the outer world, is, I think, a solemn form ob- 
served with religious care. I was the only hotel pas- 
senger on the express train, and I am inclined to think 
the arrivals of that day were a little above the average. 
Two four-horse vehicles, stately and black, were drawn 



SIENA. 295 

up in line at the gate of the yard. The force of guards 
and porters and station-men were far more rigid in 
their demeanor and less cheerful in their manner and 
movements than a body of average Italian priests and 
ecclesiastics officiating at mass. When I apj)roached 
the gold-laced and uniformed official in charge of one 
of the funereal wagons, handed him my baggage receipts, 
and told him I was going to honor "The Grand Hotel 
of the Royal Black Eagle" with my presence, he 
seemed staggered and stunned at the unwonted sound, 
and by the magnitude of the responsibility so suddenly 
cast upon him. Recovering from the shock, however, 
he very soon directed some one else, who in turn ordered 
still another, to go and get my trunks, and in due time 
everything was accomplished decently and in order. I 
entered my hearse-like carriage of state, the empty om- 
nibus drove off slowly in silence and dignity, three 
officials mounted my wagon, the procession moved de- 
corously up the hill towards the town, the gates of the 
train-yard were softly closed, the station-men sank 
back in repose, and the quiet of a Sabbath fell upon 
the Siena depot. 

About half a mile up you enter the walls of the 
town, and as the great iron gates close behind you this 
world is shut out, — the nineteenth century, the life 
that you know. You are shut in with the fourteenth 
century. You feel an unknown sensation in which the 
whole life of the mediaeval times envelops you, — takes 
possession of you. You are in an un buried Pompeii of 
the Middle Ages. 

It is, indeed, a most singular and wonderful study. 
Here is a massive city, full of stately palaces, grand 
churches, softly-splashing fountains, spacious squares 
paved with fine stones and ornamented with beautiful 
columns, its streets thronged with people, — childreu are 
at play, men move in their shops, soldiers stand guard 
before the palaces, priests silently steal along the ways, 
— but the city is dead, absolutely dead, to all that we 



296 NORTHERN ITALY. 

call life and to all that we know. It has, so far as we 
can see, no meaning or place in this world now. It 
exists — these people live and move and have their daily 
being — solely by the impulse of a force originally pro- 
jected in the Middle Ages, and which, never renewed, 
is lessening every day. 

Siena is a segment of the Middle Ages projected into 
the nineteenth century, and held there like a fly in 
amber. Let us look a little more closely at the wonder- 
ful picture. Siena is to-day an inland town of some 
twenty-three thousand or twenty-five thousand inhabi- 
tants, — about the size of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania. 
Hundreds of years ago it had a population of over one 
hundred thousand souls, — busy men of action, soldiers at 
a time when arms was the great profession, artists of first 
fame in the world, learned priests and scholars, powerful 
citizens, merchants trading over all the seas, architects, 
builders, workers of every kind. These people built 
their city and their houses for defence and for eternity, 
with walls from three to twenty feet thick, and they 
are all there yet. Consequently, the Sienese of to-day 
live in castles and palaces almost for nothing, and the 
town remains a perfect mediaeval picture. It is more 
than a picture : it is a survival. 

Once inside of Siena, closed in its narrow streets 
paved with smooth, flat stones joined as regularly as 
the masonry of the walls that rise up abruptly almost 
within arm's-length on each side of you, one never sees 
the green fields or the sky, except as a thin line of blue 
or soft gray directly overhead. In the night-time there 
is seen likewise only a segment of the stars. It is a 
gloomy, sombre city of heavy shadows and cool, moist 
atmosphere, — an atmosphere that breathes forever over 
stone and cold marble. You see no woodwork in the 
streets, save, perhaps, an occasional ponderous door, — 
a modern injection and anachronism. The palaces join 
each other and face on the narrow, irregular streets in 
long lines as do our houses, but every house is a fort- 



SIENA. 297 

ress, built of massive masonry, — sometimes buttressed, 
— its walls capable of resisting cannon. The great 
stones are firmly set one on and in another till the 
whole looks like a natural rock. Solid stone benches 
often stand along the front of the house in the street- 
way. There are no windows, but only apertures cov- 
ered with immense wrought-iron grates, and these are 
very sparing. To the side of each window and door 
on the lower floor are fastened huge iron spikes, from 
each one of which hangs a great ring, also of tough 
wrought-iron. Intelligent Italians of this day could 
not tell me the ancient use of these fastenings, and for 
a time they were mysterious puzzles. History seems 
to show that they were used to stretch great chains 
across the street in times of fighting. 

It is impossible to describe the monumental appear- 
ance of old Siena, or how these ponderous, castellated 
dwellings call up the life and legend of mediaeval time. 
These houses have seen tragedies within and troubles 
without. Men have scaled and stormed them ; men 
have been flung dead and living from their frowning 
windows ; seditions, revolutions, and riots have streamed 
around their base. But through all changes, conspira- 
cies, revolts, plunder, confiscation, barbarous revenges, 
depopulation, crime, and fierce passions within, lawless- 
ness and violence without, their great walls, gigantic, 
gloomy, severe, have stood passionless and impartial, 
like the gods of the classic pagans. Every stone seems 
to tell of the frightful tragedies, the play of ungovern- 
able passion, the wild license, the desperation of hu- 
manity, in the dense darkness of the night of supersti- 
tion, which make even the reading of mediaeval history 
so stifling and oppressive. 

Siena seems to have been forgotten of history, and 
allowed to stand untouched in the stream of time as its 
currents washed out almost all over Europe the traces 
of the w^orn-out feudal life of the Continent. Until 
within a few years no railway came near it. The lines 



298 NORTHERN ITALY. 

of trade had changed^ and it was left out of the world 
of commerce and human relations. A new art, a new 
religion, a new system of government, had come up, and 
the world knew it no more. It had nothing to give, 
and dropped out of human care or thought. It was a 
two days' journey by horse or carriage, through an un- 
defended country, and men did not come near it. So 
it remained unchanged. Even now its isolation is 
curiously strange. It has lived so long out of the 
world that with a railway at its door it cannot come in. 
It has no sympathies with our modern life, and our 
blood will not flow into its corpse. There are but two 
great hotels, — that is, hotels for the use of strangers. 
I was the first guest for a week at mine. I came alone, 
ate alone, sat alone in the empty chambers, went away 
alone. At Rome I had unfortunately left my Baede- 
ker, covering Central Italy, and was entirely without 
any detailed information as to the history of the place 
or local points of interest, only knowing of its great 
cathedral and its importance as an early school of art. 
I went out to buy anything that would help me 
through, either one of the standard guide-books or any 
local publication, but I could not find even a book-store. 
I have reason to believe from what I have learned since 
that there is now such a store in the place, but it is cer- 
tainly not conspicuous. All along the rather brilliant 
shops of the Corso or main street I searched for it in 
vain, and had to come aw^ay as poor as I entered. 
Again, in the stone-covered porch of the side entrance 
to the grand cathedral there were posted on the church 
walls, as is the custom in Italy, public notices, — some 
civil, some ecclesiastical. There were in all but some 
six or eight on the wall, and one of them was dated 
as far back as 1870. Only one, I think, bore date of 
this year. Time has no more any meaning to Siena ; a 
day is as a hundred years. 

It is the cathedral which the travellers that find Siena 



SIENA. 299 

come to see, and it is one of the great churches of 
Europe, whether you view it in itself or in its relation 
to the history and development of art. This noble 
edifice was built in the thirteenth century, in the early 
Italian-Gothic style, in many respects the most effective 
order of church architecture. It made on me a much 
stronger and more pleasing impression as a church than 
St. Peter's, which has something of a polytheistic char- 
acter, — a pantheon for the modern mythology of Rome, 
— or than the handsome ball-room effect, inside and out, 
of the graceful Madeleine at Paris. 

In this remarkable church, which exists now just as 
it did five hundred years ago, whichever way you look, 
long aisles of Gothic arched columns stretch away like 
the trees of the forest. Under them kneeling groups 
cluster, or entering worshippers move noiselessly for- 
ward like ants. So great is the grand nave, so wide 
the dark aisles, so high the fretted ceiling, that you do 
not hear the feet of rude men and wooden-shod peasant 
women as they tramp the marble floor. The noble 
dead of mediaeval ages sleep in their stone coffins about 
you in peaceful and eternal rest. The organ rolls, the 
clouds of incense float upward, and by their tombs the 
same rhythmic prayers ascend that these men heard 
here in their lifetimes. All around in niches and 
chapels stand fine statues, not the morbid and ascetic 
w^ork of a later period, but after the more human fash- 
ion of the antique, rejoicing in the beauty and loveliness 
of the human figure. In front, against a dark back- 
ground of ancient, rich wood-carving panelling the 
walls and covering the stalls of the choir, stands out 
the great main altar, splendid in its mass of silver and 
its hundred lights, glittering with jewels and gleaming 
crosses, and the gold-worked robes of the priests, and 
you think of Jupiter come down to see DansB. The 
time has passed when religion can be taught or en- 
forced by dramatic effects. The aesthetic fVible of classic 
legend, and the lower theatrical splendors of the 



300 NORTHERN ITALY. 

medlseval altar, liave both had their day, — have both 
served, perhaps, a useful purpose, and are both equally 
useless for good in this day and generation. 

In this old cathedral, where every quaint corner is a 
study, there is one very curious and striking feature 
of rare historical interest. We all know that in the 
earlier history of the Christian Church there was a 
peculiar veneration and honor for the pagan sibyls. 
They were held in great esteem, and perhaps some- 
thing more ; but just what were the honors paid them, 
or how far the respect verged on something higher, is 
not clear. A great saint, in a great hymn yet used in 
the burial-service of the Catholic Church, did not 
scruple to write, — 

" Teste David cum Sibylla." 

Did they rank with the prophets ? Were they a 
little lower than the angels ? 

Here they are all in the great cathedral of Siena 
with the saints and martyrs, and their presentation is 
on such a large scale as to make them one of the dis- 
tinguishing features of the church. On the broad 
pavement of the two great aisles which flank the nave 
I found them all in colossal form. Their representa- 
tion is in fine and almost imperishable etching, — the 
etching done in white stone, inlaid in a surface of black 
marble. The designs are spirited, free, and strong, and 
the general effect very impressive. The sibyls them- 
selves — ten or twelve in number, as I remember — are 
all fine, large, comely women, most of them apparently 
about thirty-five, of full form and rounded contour. 
The figures are colossal, — about four times human size. 
Each sibyl has a brief legend in old script set in the 
black ground, giving her shadowy credentials ; some- 
times it is a sentence from an old classic, sometimes a 
monkish rescript, reciting the substance of her prophecy 
or foreshadowing. I much regret that I did not copy 



SIENA. 301 

these. Often they ran about thus : " The [Thracian] 
sibyl concerning; whom [Epaminondas] wrote." And 
that is about all we know of most of them. There 
they live in marble, the dead goddesses of two religions, 
and men have to-day only the faintest and most elusive 
traces of their being. 

The spirit of that easy-going catholicity of classic 
Rome which accepted and assimilated the gods of all 
people lingered long in Italy. In the goodly fellow- 
ship of this impressive temple are Moses and Samson 
and Socrates, Solomon and Judas Maccabseus, and on 
the pavement near the door, Hermes Trismegistos, — 
that mythical personage whose name carries one far 
back into the shadows of the morning seons. Hermes 
— Mercury — Thoth — the Logos of Egyptian tradition. 

In fact, this grand old cathedral, out of the world 
now, sleeping in the cool shades of history, is the most 
hospitable pantheon I have ever seen. It is a broad- 
church temple of mediaeval faith, whose doors opened 
wider and more freely than anything in Anglican 
England to-day. There are no national limitations 
to its honors, and it has leaped the bounds of any one 
religion. The gods and the heroes, the popes and the 
philosophers, the saints and the martyrs and the leaders, 
of many times and many people are gathered here ; 
and they rest among civic crests and municipal standards 
and flagstaifs and crucifixes carried in battle by the 
victorious Sienese six hundred years ago. 

If possible, a visit to this place should cover the 
sixth day of May, which is the festa of the great St. 
Catharine of Siena, when her head is exposed for the 
edification of the faithful, and the whole scene affords 
an excellent " interior'^ of Italian life which it is getting 
harder to see every year. St. Catharine is one of the larger 
luminaries of the Roman mythology and the divinity 
of Siena, remembered here and throughout the Church 
after the popes and the princes of Sienese splendor 
have been long forgotten. She is one of the represen- 

26 



302 NORTHERN ITALY. 

tative saints of Europe, and her curious story one of 
the best illustrative studies of mediaeval society and the 
mediaeval Church. And nowhere can it be studied to 
more advantage than in its natural setting, this quaint 
old town. 

Historically for the student, politically for the 
thoughtful American citizen, Siena is a point of instruc- 
tive study, its rise and fall a lesson pregnant with 
interest. Hundreds of years ago, before the present 
states and governments of Europe were, it was a centre 
of learning, art, and civilization, — and it was a republic ! 
From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries Pisa and 
Siena were the brightest stars in that brilliant historical 
constellation — ^the lost Republics of Italy. 

At that time they were the centre of a wonderful 
revival of art, the seats of a school of painting and 
sculpture, and particularly architecture, of fine charac- 
teristics and great promise, whose sudden appearance 
and equally sudden and complete disappearance have 
never been yet philosophically explained. It is one of 
the vexed problems of history. This period has been 
felicitously called ^^ the Renaissance before the Renais- 
sance.'^ We know little of this interesting time, and 
cannot trust that, for it has been written by priests and 
monkish chroniclers who came into power over its 
ruins. This we do know, — that these little republics 
threw the morning rays of art and learning and pros- 
perity and modern civilization over Europe. Men 
built great cities, carved grand sculptures of force and 
originality, painted great paintings, traded with distant 
lands, grew rich and powerful, and governed them- 
selves. There was freedom and glory and prosperity, 
but weakness somewhere, for in a brief time the priest 
took the place of the statesman, and night fell upon 
Europe. Then came the lethargic stupor of the Middle 
Ages, unbroken until the Reformation and the Renais- 
sance. 



SIENA. 303 

This strange episode of this time is a social and 
political tragedy, — a catastrophe in the evolution of 
human advancement. 

There is one record which remains to tell of the life 
of this fated people, — its architecture. That, fortu- 
nately, is impartial, accurate, and unimpeachable, for 
it is itself the product and result of the national life, 
and it cannot be altered or tampered with. It is here 
that the cathedral of Siena becomes of historic value, 
as well as that of Orvieto and the wonderful group of 
buildings at Pisa, of which I have before written. 
The Pisa of to-day sleeps and is meaningless, but on 
its confines, in the little field which holds the famed 
cathedral, baptistery, campanile (Leaning Tower), and 
Campo Santo, the Pisa of history still lives in beauty 
and speaks with eloquence. 

The architecture and sculpture of this time, as it 
comes down to us, has a positive and distinctive char- 
acter. It is instinct with life, and freshness, and youth. 
Its material, pure white marble relievos, or the outlines 
emphasized sometimes in black, gives the work a pecu- 
liar delicacy and attraction, and not only admits but 
seems to demand the graceful ornamentation and rich- 
ness of finish which characterize the buildings of this 
period. They abound in airy colonnades, superim- 
posed, one row on another, in ranges of arches and 
arcades often raised into the air in light and graceful 
columns multiplied and repeated and rejoicing in charm- 
ing Corinthian capitals and an affluence of leaves and 
flowers. The fa9ades of some of these churches are a 
wondrous mass of elegant figures, covering the whole 
front like a delicate veil of marble lace-work. In all 
this exuberance and wealth of ornament there is, of 
course, occasional crudity and immaturity, as there 
always must be in everything which has yet the power 
to grow, but you lose it all in the feeling of life and 
joyousness and freedom. The people who developed 
this style of architecture were in the youth of their 



304 NORTHERN ITALY. 

political state, strong, active, buoyant, and full of the 
conscious pleasure of life and the sense of progress. 
There was freedom of individual action and civil liberty. 

They had a pleasure in the life and strength of the 
human body ; they delighted in depicting the beauty 
and symmetry of its form. Their art was the child of 
Greece as well as of the hardy Gothic North, and there 
is often a curious simplicity in the mixture of classic 
and Christian legend in their sculpture. Their churches 
are bright with statuary fashioned after the antique, 
light and graceful with an architecture of delicate lijies 
and tracery that s'eem to float and carry up the build- 
ings into the air. They are lavishly dowered with 
ornament. All that is beautiful in art, all the treasures 
of wealth, have been poured into them without stint or 
measure, — lovely statues, precious stones, rare paintings, 
curiously-carved pulpits with whole lives of legend 
told in marble on their panels, altars that are solid 
masses of silver. The people who built these churches, 
so white and pure and delicate, had a cheerful religion, 
a faith of love and trust and hope. It was something 
that was the natural outgrowth and development of the 
sunshine and smiling fields of Tuscany, lustrous with 
the rich foliao^e of their olives, and wreathed and fes- 
tooned and garlanded with grapes. It was the natural 
incense of happy Italy ascending to heaven, — something 
very different from the slavish superstition and morbid 
religion that hang like a pall over this land to-day, 
when men have lost their sense of the living Christ in 
the worship of His dead body and of death. 

What might have been the future of Italy and of the 
Continent and of the world if this auspicious aurora of 
freedom had not been quenched ! How different might 
history have been if the republics of Tuscany instead of 
Rome had guided Italy ! 

And we too? It is the tragic fate of these early 
Italian republics which is the European argument 
against republicanism. Men of learning and experi- 



ORVIETO. 305 

ence in the conduct of affairs meet you with it all the 
time when you challenge a discussion of our free insti- 
tutions and form of government. The dead republics 
of Italy — dead in their youth — w^ere relatively as 
powerful as we are ; they carried their arms and com- 
merce over tlie known world. Their people were as 
prosperous as we are ; they had more of learning and 
cultivation and higher education. But — it is the ver- 
dict of history — their institutions and popular form of 
government tended to develop and bring into power 
the average and commonplace man. The state fell 
under the control of this class of men, and went rapidly 
to pieces. Now, says the European statesman, "Are 
you in America not travelling the same road ?'^ And 
it is a pretty hard question to answer. 
Siena. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



ORVIETO. 

The Hill-set Cities of Tuscany — Ashes oe the Middle 
Ages — A Palace Watting at Ten Francs a Day — 
Mediaeval Crime and Paganism — Devoted Service — The 
Legend-Fa^aded Cathedral of Orvieto — The European 
Cathedrals — Sharp Contrast between the Buildings 
AND the Worship in Them — Vin du Pays of Orvieto — 
The Wines of Italy — A Good Bishop's Death— Est, Est, 
Est, of Monte Fiascone — The Falernian Fields of 
Horace. 

Orvieto, like Siena, is the fortressed and castellated 
crown of a hill frowning Avith defiant bastions of solid 
rock, and with great gloomy gates that look treacher- 
ous and inauspicious. One almost fears to enter their 
black and yawning shadows, and recalls instinctively 
the venomous ferocities and merciless passions that 
u 26* 



306 NORTHERN ITALY. 

scorch- the pages of mediaeval Italian history. But the 
gateways are unguarded now, the threatening parapets 
empty of helmet or weapon, the ditches dry and dusty 
and unclean with the foul refuse of a modern Italian 
town. To violence and the unbridled play of lust and 
fierce, passions have succeeded exhaustion, extinction, 
ashes. Only the harmless form remains like the skele- 
ton fibre of a dead and worm-gnawed leaf. 

These hill-set cities, so distinctive and suggestive, are 
one of the charms of the lovely landscape of Tuscany, 
and Orvieto is one of the most picturesque and striking 
of them all, not even excepting Perugia. Its walls are 
steep and precipitous, sheering down for hundreds of 
feet, the solid masonry growing into the hewn tufa rock 
so that it cannot be seen where the one ends and the 
other begins. Its battlemented outlines stand clear- 
cut against the sky, grim walls and clusters of dungeon 
towers and open eampanili and ascending masses of tall 
Italian dwelling-houses forming a fine gray setting for 
the white marble relief of the famed cathedral. At sun- 
set, when the slanting rays fall across the valley, light- 
ing up the gray tops with a glory, and flooding plain 
and stream below with glowing color, it is a perfect 
picture. 

"The splendor falls on castle walls 
And snowy summits old in story ; 
The long light shakes across the lakes. 
******* 

They die in yon red sky ; 



They faint on hill or field or river 

There is a shadowy, elusive sketch of Orvieto by 
Turner in his collection in the National Gallery in 
London, all slanting lines of sunset and dissolving 
landscape ; and it is very like, for the whole spirit of 
the scene is the spirit of Turner's genius. It is Tur- 
neresque : that best describes it. 

The picture of Orvieto, however, is all from the out- 



ORVIETO. 307 

side. Once inside, the streets are narrow, dirty, mean- 
ingless, and liot. They are commonplace, too, for 
Tuscany, devoid of legend and special monument, full 
of smells, wretchedness, and uncleanness. The historic 
cathedral, brilliant in black and white, is the sole mod- 
ern attraction. There are other churches in plenty, but 
they are shabby, uninteresting, and wanting in any 
special significance. 

Few strangers find Orvieto^ for it is not a halting- 
place on the modern lines of travel ; nevertheless, the 
accommodations for the traveller are very good. He 
can have a whole palace to himself if he wants it, and 
a whole train of servants, at very little cost. Orvieto 
was once a powerful city and the home of the Guelphs, 
a family who built tlieir houses as strongholds and 
sorely needed that style of residence. It is now a deso- 
late town of a few thousand souls, but the strong rock- 
walled houses are all there yet, and the dwindled Or- 
vieto of to-day resembles a small boy struggling in his 
father's ulster. This eifect is very general over all 
Italy. 

My hotel was a palace of past generations, desolate 
and pathetic in its sunken fortunes, but grand yet. 
The rooms were spacious and stately in height and pro- 
portions. The walls were pictured in bright color 
and moving design from top to bottom, — a great serial 
story in fresco that ran through halls and chambers ; 
a tale of lords and ladies, of love and wars, of olive- 
groves and stormed fortresses, of banquets and knightly 
halls and fountains and blushing gardens, — a reminis- 
cence of Boccaccio, in fact. Along the solemn stair- 
ways, in the silent corridors and vast dining-hall, stood 
marble statues, looking so shut up and lonesome that 
it seemed as if they must speak at the dear sight of a 
human face. It was a whole lordly palace waiting for 
one, and glad to see its lord at ten francs a day. 

My bedchamber was a grand apartment on the first 
floor, so nobly high that you lost the demeaning sense 



308 NORTHERN ITALY. 

of there being any one domiciled above you, so long 
that when you placed your two wax candles in one end 
of the room you could not see the other. A glory of 
romantic frescos, too, ran all around the spacious walls. 
It was well appointed, also ; everything Avas clean and 
neat and fresh, and my assiduous retainers were only 
happy when they were bringing in continuous cans of 
hot water. The baronial floors, however, were all of 
marble and bare stone, innocent of carpet, rug, or 
matting, and there was no lock on the doors, — that had 
gone with the centuries, — although some huge wrought- 
iron clamps and hasps showed that one of no little 
strength had once been necessary. The stone walls, 
however, were four or five feet thick, and gave an emi- 
nent feeling of security. 

The table was full and good, and even elaborate, 
while the service was excellent. It was more : it was 
devoted. The traditions of the centuries of the grand- 
eur and state of the house seemed to come down upon 
the dignified, stately old servant who officiated as but- 
ler and footman and gar9on, and he did his best to 
meet the accumulated responsibilities. He struggled 
manfully to supply in himself the services of a whole 
retinue and conceal the deficiency of the troops of 
servitors that once lined the hospitable halls. At my 
private apartments he announced in stately form, " The 
dinner is served, signor," and bent with grave obei- 
sance as I passed through the solid stone doorway. He 
disappeared deftly, and as I approached the great door 
of the old dining-hall there he was again, drawn up in 
the shadowy similitude of two invisible lines of solemn 
footmen. I walked between him in serious state, and, 
lo ! he was behind my chair as I made ready to sit down 
to my solitary dinner, served under courtly frescos and 
statuary and a wealth of drooping flowers. The eflbrts 
of this ancient servitor to support the departed glories 
of the house, his simple fidelity to the name and blood 
and dignities that had drifted away hundreds of years, 



OR VIETO. 309 

was almost touching. It never relaxed for a moment 
during the twenty-four hours of my stay, every meal 
being served with equal state commensurate to its rank 
in the service of the day. And when on leaving I 
played my American part in the comedy by giving 
from the parting "good-hand^^ a five-franc note, I 
think the old fellow dreamed for a brief moment that 
perhaps the good old days of princes and Cencian 
ladies and brigand cardinals had come back again. 

In-doors Orvieto was very pleasant and comfortable. 
Out of doors the sun-baked town is unattractive and 
worse than comfortless. The whole place, perched on 
a high mass of rock and forever exposed to the beating 
rays, is parched and heated. The whole life of the 
place is dry and miserable. The sweet breath of the 
fields never blows here. No fragrance of fresh leaves 
and flowers ever reaches this parched town swung high 
in the hot air. The streets glare, the walls are the 
home of the glittering lizard. The whole impression 
of the place is disappointing, it is so unlike the soft 
and gentle wine of Orvieto, famous even down to 
Rome, or the graceful tracery of the cathedral, — the 
two associations of the spot. 

In solid Siena, with its comfortable bourgeois exist- 
ence, you seem to feel even at this day something of 
the real life of the Middle Ages. It is passionless and 
still, but living yet, although without relation or mean- 
ing to our time. Orvieto is dead, — an extinct volcano, 
— an ashy residuum of mediaeval crime. There is 
nothing in the history of society more appalling than 
Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is 
hard to conceive of it now, — impossible to reconstruct it 
even in imao^ination. AYe are all somewhat familiar 
with the Borgias and the Cencis, whose annals blister 
the history of Rome and are conspicuous because of that 
theatre, but all interior Italy was filled with just such 
great families, of whom the world now knows nothing, 



310 NORTHERN ITALY. 

but who were just as wdcked, just as passionate, just as 
defiant of God and man. They pkmdered and fought 
with each other. They poisoned and intrigued and cast 
each other into merciless prisons. Their very love was 
defiant and criminal and shameless. The struggles of 
these families, dissolute, abandoned, and unrestrained 
by any conventions of society or religion, w^ere the poli- 
tics of the time. They made popes and added the 
prostitution of the headship of the visible Church to 
personal and private vice. It was an age of delirium, 
— a kaleidoscopic whirl of guilt, — an age of ungovern- 
able passions, of barbarous ferocities, of vicious pleas- 
ures indnlged in openly as by pagans. The picture of 
that day is a confused panorama of morbid superstition 
and measureless crimes; of masses and miracles and 
murders ; of poisonings and appalling incests ; of fla- 
gellants; of conspiracies and treacheries ; of dungeons 
and tortures and atrocious cruelties. This was the Italy 
of Orvieto. 

The modern renown of Orvieto is its beautiful cathe- 
dral, another of those magnificent Italian Gothic struc- 
tures, all clad in white and edged in black, after the 
striking fashion of the Pisan, Sienese, and Florentine 
work. The whole facade of the front is covered with a 
Avhite net-work of miniature statuary, — the history of 
the world, apparently, according to mediaeval tradition, 
in a series of tableaux. There are thousands of figures. 
The pictures begin with Adam and Eve. Many of 
the scenes are recognizable, but quite a number are 
evidently legends that are now entirely lost. All the 
designs are intensely realistic, and many of them ex- 
ceedingly quaint. In the Creation of Eve, for instance, 
Adam lies in a dead sleep on tlie ground while God, 
a venerable old man with a carving-knife, is making a 
slit in his side with one hand, while with the other He 
drags out Eve, whose well-coifPured head and shoulders 
are just visible. 

The building of this cathedral itself is a curious - 



OR VIE TO. 311 

illustration of the wonderful contrasts of its time. It 
is built in comruemoration of a miracle establishing the 
dogma of transubstantiation. There was a sceptical 
})riest who doubted the truth of this doctrine. Once, 
when offering mass, he tempted a physical test of the 
sacred w^afer, when it immediately bled in the five 
gashes, the great drops of blood falling upon and stain- 
ing the napkin. The fact of this bleeding is perfectly 
well authenticated by such evidence as attests the mass 
of mediaeval church history. It was officially attested 
by Pope Urban IV., and a cathedral ordered to be 
built in its honor. Now, the wonderful contrast is 
between the coarse conception of the miracle and the 
refined, artistic conception of the cathedral, the bloody 
thaumaturgy of the altar and the pure and delicate 
work of the temple. The miracle tells of a barbarous 
condition of mind and society ; the cathedral, although 
of the same age, is a work of the highest order of art. 
And this strong contrast between the men who built 
the cathedrals and the men who conduct the worship 
in them confronts one all the time in Europe. The 
architecture of the buildings is of the highest reach of 
art, always dignified, and sometimes approaching a 
sublimity that cannot be transcribed in words. The 
altars are nearly always tawdry with tinsel or barbaric 
riches, while the devotional decorations are coarse and 
puerile beyond conception, — ghastly, writhing images, 
grinning skulls, dried human limbs or whole corpses, 
wax figures gorgeous in green and yellow hues and 
encased in cheap glass fronts, marble images with tin 
crowns or clothetl in silk and cotton skirts. Sometimes 
the altars are furnished with imitation ornaments — 
counterfeit candlesticks and tin splendors — and from 
the rear they look as shabby, fraudulent, and dreary as 
the " behind the scenes" of a second-rate theatre. The 
builder seems always to have been educated and vigor- 
ous, the priest ignorant and vulgar. Were the builders 
an unknown order of men who have disappeared, or 



312 NORTHERN ITALY. 

was the Church of the thirteenth century something 
immeasurably superior to the Church of the nineteenth 
century ? 

At Orvieto you touch the finest wine-growing dis- 
trict of modern Italy. The wine of Orvieto itself is a 
gentle, straw-colored liquid, much esteemed both for 
its delicate flavor and soft acidulous properties. It is 
known at Rome and is good there, but, like all the 
Italian wines, should be drank in its own district. 
They are all of them so delicate as riot to bear trans- 
portation even for fifty miles. The districts are also 
very limited, so that one changes his wine nearly every 
day when travelling in Italy. Even if the wines of, 
Italy were strong and rough enough to bear transpor- 
tation, the vineyards of any one grape are too small to 
establish any given brand in the markets of the world. 

At Montefiascone, a few miles south of Orvieto, the 
traveller tastes the queen of all the wines of Italy to- 
day. It is the Montefiascone, or wine of the country, — 
a Muscatel, the finest brand of which is popularly known 
as Est, Est, Est. Its name is flavored with a legend. 
Many hundreds of years ago a princely bishop of 
Bohemia (the Bohemia of geography and not of letters) 
was travelling to Rome in state. Before him a whole 
day's journey always went a tried retainer, who tasted 
the wines of the land and left for his lord a report, 
writing '^ Est" on the doore of that inn where the best 
was to be had. When the lord bishop came to Monte- 
fiascone, on the doors of the village hostelry was 
written, " Est, est, est." So good was the wine that 
the bishop never got any farther, but died there shortly 
afterwards. Sir John Evelyn, travelling in 1644, 
says that he saw here the tomb of the bishop, with this 
inscription : 



^'Propter Est, Est, Est, 
Domimis mens mortuus est.^' 



ORVIETO. 313 

The modern story is broader, and relates the in- 
scription as — 

^^Est, Est, Est. Propter nimium est, 
Dominus mens mortuus est." 

Evelyn, in his quaint and simple diary, seems to con- 
found this wine with the Falernian of Horace, con- 
fusing, most likely, Falerii, the modern village of Civita 
Castellana, near Moutefiascone, with Falernus. What 
is given one now in Italy as Falernian wine is rather 
poor stuff, but red and powerful as Horace sings it. 
The modern Moutefiascone is a very mild wine and 
light in color, its flavor so delicate and elusive that it 
needs quite a cultivated taste to judge its virtues. At 
first trial it feels in the mouth almost like pure, soft 
rain-water, but the full benediction of its blessings 
comes in time. The Horatian Falernian fields had 
grown poor and harsh in Pliny^s time, and it is proba- 
ble that they have entirely disappeared now. But, in 
drinking the soft and limpid Moutefiascone, one begins 
to understand what may have been the generous inspi- 
ration of the warmth with which Horace sings the 
wines of his country, — a warmth which an experience 
of the modern wines of Italy hardly justifies. 



27 



314 NORTHERN ITALY. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

PISTOJA. 

The Local Color or the Italy of To-day — A Roman Pre- 
TORiAN Palace — A Mediaeval Hall oe Judgment and 
A Modern Court-House — The Feast of Corpus Christi 
IN A Rural Diocese — The Miracles of Provincial Italy 
— A Dying Eaith — A Touching Peasant Bambino — An 
Italian Provincial Inn — The Smiling Fields of Tus- 
cany. 

Pistoja is another of those picturesque Tuscan 
towns so interesting as having had their day in the 
early ages of the lost republics of Italy, — that aurora 
of art and freedom in Europe, but a morning that 
never saw the fulness of noon. It is full of the art 
and architecture of the Pisan and Sienese school, and 
abounding in quaint remains of the feudal times of 
mediaeval Italy. 

It is in these hidden cities rather than in the mod- 
ernized towns that one can best study the past and see 
the present life of Italy. Here you find the native 
manners, the dress and costumes, of the different classes, 
and, most interesting of all, see the every-day life and 
faith of the people. Here are the open-air altars ; the 
provincial festas ; the miracles of the soil ; the quaint 
old churches, with their mediaeval legends graven in 
stone, their feudal tombs worn and dusty ; the curious 
black Madonnas ; the beasts of the Apocalypse in all 
their grotesque ugliness ; the devotional wax-works for 
the peasants, dressed with beads and crown and satins, 
male dolls as well as female, and framed and protected 
in glass cases ; the Bambinos, rude but often touching in 
their earnest homeliness ; in brief, the local deities and 
the local color of Italian religion. 



PIS TO J A. 315 

PIstoja is an idyllic country town, and looks very 
lovely under the summer foliage and in its provincial 
festa dress. It is the feast of Corpus Christi when I 
am in it. Although bright with the life of this time, 
it is a very ancient place. Catiline was killed here be- 
fore the time of Christ, and it must always have been 
a fighting-point, as it is just at the foot of the Alps and 
commands one of the passes into Italy. Nevertheless, 
altliough abounding in picturesque and imposing palaces 
and mediaeval buildings, it has not the narrow streets 
and gloomy aspect of the ordinary Italian town whose 
foundations were laid and conditioned either in the 
feudal ages or the earlier times of imperial or repub- 
lican Rome. It is light, cheerful, airy, spacious, — a 
little Italian Paris. In the Middle Ages it had repute 
for its manufactures of arms, and tradition says the 
pistol was invented here and took its name from the 
town. 

The distinctive feature of Pistoja to-day, perhaps, is 
its ancient Pretorian Palace, now serving for a court- 
house, as it did of old under another name. In the 
"Hall of the Tribunal" you see yet untouched the mas- 
sive stone benches of the old judges, and in front of 
these the great stone table, — a suggestively-gloomy 
court-room of the Middle Ages. Directly facing the 
seats of the judges there is a curious picture on the wall 
of a fox dressed in robes and sitting in judgment, — one 
of those singular freaks of fancy or satire which you 
come across all the time in mediaeval researches. In 
fact, this whole hall is remarkable for its wealth of 
feudal heraldic lore, and is known and prized the world 
over for its riches in this line of study. 

This entire hall, which is vaulted and supported by 
massive square columns, is wholly covered — ceilings, 
walls, stairways, and columns — with feudal coats-of- 
arms graven or painted on the stone; some are set in, 
others cut in, others frescoed. There is not an inch of 
woodwork in the whole hall, — nothing but stone and 



316 NORTHERN ITALY. 

wrought iron, — or, if I remember aright, any windows, 
the light coming in from an opening in the ceiling. 
Among the other striking remains is a set of feudal 
standards, twelve in number, "the gonfalons of the 
companies of the people," proud memories of republi- 
can civic glory. The place is rich also in antique in- 
scriptions. The modern contribution to this interest- 
ing historical monument is a large tablet, set in the main 
stairway, in honor of the soldiers who died in achieving 
the union and independence of Italy. 

There is a quaint mediaeval feature in these towns 
in the constant repetition in all places — on the public 
buildings, in the churches, in the piazzas, on the foun- 
tains, in the streets, on columns and doors — of the 
figure of some animal, the symbol and popular crest of 
the town. In addition to all this, each ward is desig- 
nated by a column surmounted with the "city arms" 
in shape of the symbolic statue, and numbered with 
the number of the district. In Siena it was the wolf 
suckling Romulus and E-emus, and the design — always 
the same — was very spirited and much superior to the 
carving in Rome. Here it is the lion. You see him 
everywhere, grim, worn, and stained, and, as some of 
these effigies have come down from the twelfth century, 
sometimes he is rather decrepid. 

It was my fortune to be in Pistoja on the Sunday of 
the feast of Corpus Christi. I had seen the procession 
also in Massa, a much ruder place, a few days previous. 
The feature of this feast is a procession in which the 
consecrated wafer — or, as it is always popularly called 
here on this feast, the body of Christ — is carried by 
the bishop through the streets for the adoration of the 
people. The sight of this spectacle gives one a very 
good idea of the popular religion. In Massa the sacred 
burden was followed immediately by a brass band, and 
was preceded by bands of peasants and little children, 
marshalled by nuns, bearing tapers and singing hymns, 



PJSTOJA. 317 

— a rude procession, but rather eifective at a distance. 
Here the ceremonies were more elegant, and the scene 
in the church very brilliant and in good taste as well 
as picturesque, — the white masks of the penitents, tlie 
long white veils of the girls, the lilies and the roses, 
the gleaming wax-lights, the bending and kneeling 
worshippers, the clouds of incense, and the radiating 
splendors of the altar, a shaking mass of flame and gold 
and silver, making a very dramatic tableau. 

The devotion and reverence was absolute. I have 
never seen it equalled save once, in the Mormon temple 
at Salt Lake City, in Utah, when the late Brigham 
Young was speaking, and after a while bluntly an- 
nounced in coarse English that the Spirit of God was 
on him and he was going to reveal. The vast assem- 
blage of devout Mormons then seemed to feel the 
bodily presence of God in their midst, just as the de- 
vout Roman peasant does to-day all over Italy. There 
is no mistaking the feeling and belief of this people in 
this matter. It is no question of trans or con, no re- 
finement of scientific theology, with them. They have 
a corporeal God, and worship Him just as truly and 
earnestly and with as simple faith as their forefathers 
worshipped Jupiter on the same spot. And therein 
lies the mortmain grasp — the dead hand — of the priest- 
hood of Italy. The whole scene irresistibly reminded 
me of the insolent retort recorded in history of a me- 
diaeval prelate to some civil ruler: "I hold your God 
in my hands every day." The indiscreet priest who 
made this famous reply only phrased in other words 
the " What are you going to do about it ?" of the New 
York political rough. And the situation was very 
much the same. 

Both here and at Massa the bishops had dull, heavy, 
gross faces, — the faces of men given to overeating and 
blind following. In fact, in Italy, ecclesiastical promo- 
tion depends on mediocrity, for it rests on servile obe- 
dience. The Roman bishop, as far as my observation 

27* 



318 NORTHERN ITALY. 

goes, is not the equal, morally or iDtellectually, of the 
average American priest. 

The absence of the young and middle-aged men and 
the men of the better classes from these religious cere- 
monies was marked and suggestive. (Neither at Massa 
did they take part or still less here.) The whole attend- 
ance and participation was by peasants and little chil- 
dren. The better classes were represented solely by 
women. In fact, the religion of Italy is a shell. Faith 
is in a transition state, just as in the time of Constan- 
tine. The upper classes and educated people do not 
believe at all in the popular religion, nor, I think, do 
the higher ranks of the clergy, who administer it as a 
political machine, and either laugh at the credulity of 
the common people or defend it as the best thing for 
them in their ignorant condition. A monk, for instance, 
in a well-known church of Rome, for ten cents uncov- 
ered and showed me the imprint of the feet of Christ, 
made on a marble slab on a certain occasion when He 
miraculously visited Italy. The shape of the foot 
was neither Hebrew nor Arabian. The size was co- 
lossal and the contour clumsy. I cannot think that 
the learned cardinals, many of them men of scientific 
and historic erudition, believed what this simple monk 
believed. Nevertheless, they — English and American 
as well as Italian cardinals — accept principalities in a 
kingdom whose revenues are raised from the offerings 
of poor peasants who come to kiss and kneel before 
just such relics. This relic, too, was quite respectable 
compared with many of them, and their quantity is 
innumerable, as well as are the miracle-working images 
and shrines. I had my rooms in Rome on a short street, 
about the length of two Philadelphia squares, and sit- 
uated in the middle of the city. At one end of the 
street was the decapitated head of St. John and at the 
other a picture of the Madonna — quite a good work of 
art, by the way — which has spoken from its frame, and 
is, in consequence, very much adored. Lights were 



PISTOJA. 319 

always burning at its shrine, which I never found 
deserted of worshippers. I met several Madonnas who 
had spoken or moved their eyes, and were in conse- 
quence objects of special adoration. Indeed, the popu- 
larity of certain images in Italy to the exclusion of 
others apparently equally deserving is one of the curi- 
ous features of the churches. These inanimate idols 
of wood or wax or marble have their fortunes just like 
popular preachers or actresses. In the fine old church 
of St. Ambrose, in Milan, on a slight metal column 
in the middle of the nave, I saw twined a brazen ser- 
pent which popular belief accredits as that which Moses 
lifted up in the desert. 

Pistoja is strong in mediaeval churches, abounding in 
graven images, odd statues, quaint tombs, curious in- 
scriptions, legendary paintings, and the conventional 
rural presepe. Some of these things are rude, others 
works of high art and sometimes of great costliness. 
There is a famous silver altar here on which men worked 
for two entire centuries, the fourteenth and fifteenth, a 
splendid and enduring monument of patient and con- 
secrated labor that assuredly deserves its well-known 
and well-won place in the history of silver-work. 

Over the tomb of a great old feudal family — a family 
that furnished cardinals and warriors in the history of 
Pistoja hundreds of years ago — I found the following 
Latin puzzle. The tomb lies in the pavement in front 
of the main altar of one of the old churches : 

Terra Teras Terram 
Te Terram Terra 
Tenebit. 
Terra Trahet Transit 
Torrida Terra 
Trahet. 

This play on tetra is not infrequent in the mediaeval 
epitaphs. 

In another old church there is a Bambino, with its 
little legs tightly wrapped and swaddled, just as Italian 



320 NORTHERN ITALY. 

women swaddle their babies to-day, which is very much 
the same way as Indian papooses are bound up in our 
country, excepting that boards are not used. The hum- 
ble homeliness of this representation seemed at first sight 
very odd and ignorant, but it probably is the literal 
truth. I suppose the middle and lower-class Roman 
women in the time of Augustus swaddled their children 
in just the same way as the same classes do here now, 
and if so, then these provincial peasants, in their child- 
like simplicity, are right, and the conventional picture 
of the Madonna and child, the world over, is wrong, 
so far as the accurate representation of fact is concerned. 
Among so much that is rude and coarse and ignorant, 
one comes all the time on fine paintings, beautiful fres- 
cos, and grand carvings and statuary. 

At this provincial place I had the experience of a 
purely Italian reception. There was not a servant or 
attendant of any kind at the inn who spoke a word of 
French, German, or English. The table, which was 
excellent, was of Italian cooking. The service was 
unexceptionable and the rooms were good and clean, 
but how these Italian inns exist is a continual mystery. 
Here again I was the only guest, enjoying the undivided 
attention and service of the whole establishment, which 
was complete and full. At Bologna I met an acquaint- 
ance who had followed my visit to Pistoja about a week 
later and gone to the same inn. He also had had the 
house to himself during his stay. Nevertheless, these 
inns, though existing apparently on the casual chance 
of an occasional visitor, are excellent and often admirable 
hostelries, — everything clean and good, the service of a 
high order, the table plentiful, even to a fair selection 
of wines, and the host cheerful, attentive, and obliging. 
The rooms, and halls too, are generally lined with old 
oil-paintings and bric-a-brac carvings, and in the eve- 
nings there is good music on '^ the piazza." 

Pistoja is a fairly pleasant place to rest in, because 



PISTOJA. 321 

f'oming from the north you enter here on the lovely 
land of Tuscany and meet its early charms. Here you 
begin (o see the laughing vineyards, with the vines and 
grapes festooned in graceful sweeps, until all the fields 
seem to be dancing like little loves and Bacchuses. 
Here you find again — after the ashen and leaden gloom 
of England — the dear blue skies of our own land. 
Here in this very Pistoja you can sit in the open air in 
the streets or piazzas (public squares) and drink your 
wine under groves of blushing oleanders. Here are 
tiie golden lemon-trees and flowering almonds, the fra- 
grant orange-blossoms, and avenues of grieving cypress. 
Here are the dark-green olive-trees, the generous breast 
of the earth. 

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the landscape 
of Italy is the human shape which the olive-tree takes. 
It seems always to be a human form struggling to 
escape from the imprisonment of a lower life. Some- 
times these shapes are of a grotesque and goblin effect, 
but more often they are writhing, twisted, and contorted 
as if in pain. In the very fields and hillsides all around 
him, one reads Ovid again, and all that weird legend 
of torture and suffering in an outer life so strong in 
Italian literature. It needs no imagination to see in 
these gnarled trunks and struggling roots the im- 
prisoned souls of Dante's verse and Dore's pencil. 
They are there. These ghostly trees inspired the poet 
and the painter. 

Tuscany has always been the native home of beauty. 
It was the land of the Etruscans, that wonderful 
people whose sense of form is yet a marvel. It was 
the ^^ Tyrrhenian shores" of the Greek, but it was 
never lovelier or more fascinating than it is now. 



322 NORTHERN ITALY. 



CHAPTER XXXIY. 



EAVENNA. 

An Abandoned Imperial City — Christian and Arian 
EuiNS — The Cradle of Pure Christian Art and Civil- 
ization — The Old Mosaics — The Honor oe Melchisedek 
IN THE Churches of Kavenna — Tomb oe The.odoric — 
Dull Bologna. 

To get to Ravenna from almost anywhere^ as tlie 
lines of travel are now arranged, one is forced to go 
through Bologna, and as the Italian railways connect by 
w^hat Italians themselves call '^ coincidences,^' one has 
usually some time on hand there. It is a fatal railway 
centre, to which one comes again and again in seeing 
North Italy, for Bologna is a dull, heavy town, monoto- 
nous from its perpetual arcades, which soon lose their first 
effect of novelty, and serve only to darken and depress. 
The place has the gloominess without the picturesqueness 
of a mediseval-built city, and in its general effect is 
unpleasing, devoid of lightness, elegance, or cultivated 
taste. Even its famous leaning-towers are heavy, dirty, 
and drunken- looking. It is coarse, solid, very sub- 
stantial, but shapeless,' — something like its famous 
sausages, which are its symbolic product and devel- 
opment. It has contributed some other achievements 
to the meat-market of the world, which are proudly 
displayed in its shops. The mass of the people whom 
you see on the streets are like their town. They have 
heavy forms, gross, round faces, the lines almost ob- 
literated by corpulence, — the faces and bodies of heavy 
feeders, well-to-do, vulgar bourgeois. 

The architecture is solid, monotonous, and much of 
it rough. Perhaps the central point of interest which 



EA VENN A. 323 

they show one is a singular pile of churches, coming 
through several ages down from the fifth century, and 
now all worked into one. These churches, seven in 
number, were built in a confused kind of way, at 
different times, on the site of an ancient temple of Isis. 
They are of different levels, one being clear under the 
main one and serving now as a crypt, of different orders 
of architecture, mostly quite rude and early, of differ- 
ent sizes, sha|)es, and dedications. As they could not 
all exist in this tumbled-over condition, each encroach- 
ing on the other and pushing it into ruin, they have all 
been restored, made to communicate interiorly, and 
built or pressed into one conglomerate mass known now 
as St. Stephen's. It is quite interesting and suggestive, 
but it is a kind of sausage, too, in its way. 

I have been laid over at Bologna twice, and am always 
glad to get out of it. It is a town where the sense of 
the predominance of the physical is oppressive and re- 
pulsive, — Bologna " la grassa." 

From heavy Bologna you run down to Ravenna 
returning, unless you are going to make the coast-line 
tour of Italy. Ravenna, once the capital of the Occi- 
dental Empire, the city of emperors, exarchs, and regal 
bishops, though rude and fallen, stripped of its former 
wealth and possessions, and a very picture of desola- 
tion, is a most interesting place. 

It is of vast historic significance, as the point where 
Christian art and social life had opportunities to de- 
velop their own growth, free from the dominating 
intellectual influences of the Roman civilization which 
they succeeded and displaced. Here Christian civili- 
zation flourished on its own soil and was powerful. 
It could develop freely its own germ and law of society, 
affected only by the Byzantine culture which it met on 
even terms, fighting and trading with the East. 

The town in its general effect is rude, humble, and 
inelegant, poorly laid out, and the few palaces yet 



324 NORTHERN ITALY. 

standing showing little traces of magnificence or 
luxury. The dwellings of the commoner kind are 
very poor and coarse, the streets narrow and confined. 
There are no grand piazzas or promenades, or great, 
luxurious, open spaces. The tombs of euiperors and 
empresses are solid and enduring, but their decoration 
rude and primitive. In fact, it is hard to think of 
Ravenna as an imperial centre. The churches are 
interesting in their early half- Byzantine order of archi- 
tecture and their quaint mosaics, picturing rudely the 
Christian thought and legend of early mediaeval his- 
tory. 

They show how strong was the influence of the Old 
Testament on the thinking and life of the early cen- 
turies as compared with ours. Moses, Abraham, Elijah, 
Joshua, Abel, Melchisedek, Samson, Solomon, Adam, 
were real men for Europe in that age, whose influence 
was daily felt and appreciated. The churches of Italy 
are full of their images. In these churches of Ravenna 
the influencing force seems to have been the patriarchal 
and earlier life of the Old Testament. Melchisedek 
offering bread and wine is everywhere. It is one of 
the features of Ravenna. The quaint representations 
of this scene pictured on altar after altar in old mosaic, 
prove how minute is the change in the daily habits of 
life here even through the length of a thousand years. 
Melchisedek, the friend of God and King of Salem, 
generally stands behind or near a humble wooden table 
on which are the bread and wine. The stiff" little table 
is precisely such as is found in a common Italian dwell- 
ing now. The wine is in a cheap crane-necked flask, 
just as it is sold in any Roman shop now, and the bread 
is a pile of the same execrably sodden wads served one 
in any trattoria to-day. The meal of Melchisedek, as 
set forth in these antique Ravenna mosaics, is pre- 
cisely that which has been served me more than once 
this year when I entered a wayside inn in rural Italy 
and asked for lunch. Next after this scene comes 






RA VENN A. 325 

Abel with his sacrifice of a lamb, and the offering 
up of Isaac. Abraham entertaining the three angels 
— the table witli the food on it being always con- 
spicuous — and Elijah fed by the ravens occur often. 
Briefly stated, the sacrificial legend of the Old Testa- 
ment, and those stories from it which relate the giving 
or taking of food from heaven, are the motif of these 
walls. The pictures of these scenes generally occur in 
chronological succession, closing with the life of Christ, 
— a kind of illustrated historical argument. The actual 
scene of the Crucifixion does not often appear, as it rarely 
ever does in the Catacombs, and for the same reason, 
that the event was yet a matter of deep shame and 
mortification to the struggling Church. The symbol 
of the cross does not appear in the Catacombs, I think, 
at all until the fourth century. 

The predominant influence on the early Church at 
Ravenna was not only the Old Testament, but, very 
singularly, the first few chapters of it. This is strongly 
evidenced by the old mosaics. These pictured walls 
were the church history of the time, and the great bulk 
of their history does not get beyond the biblical record 
as contained in the book of Genesis, short of the story 
of Joseph. Indeed, if a travelling Japanese scholar, 
ignorant of our history, were to drop down in Ravenna, 
he would probably think that Melchisedek was the di- 
vinity to whose worship these strange old churches had 
been erected. 

This revelation of these almost forgotten walls is an 
evidence of how insularity or ignorance may amplify 
any fragment that seizes on its imagination, and perhaps 
swell it into an imposing fabric. These early Christians, 
rude and simple and earnest, knew nothing more of 
Melchisedek than we do, but his brief story, appealing 
in some way to their hopes or wants, became a vivid 
reality, directing their devotions and coloring their whole 
theological thought for several centuries. This name of 
Melchisedek, which is not named perhaps once a year 

28 



326 NORTHERN ITALY. 

in a modern Protestant church, was to these Ravenna 
Christians a name second only to that of Christ. 

The Ravenna which we see is the Ravenna of the 
sixth centnry, and these old basilicas are therefore not 
lumbered up with the importunate crowd of mediaeval 
saints who press nearly everything else out of most of 
the modern Italian churches. They are filled, how- 
ever, with scenes in the lives of the Christian emperors, 
who seem to have been held in the Church at that time 
in much the same honor as a saint in the Middle Ages. 
Church and state were evidently bound up far more 
closely than anything we know of now. 

The mosaics, for which the town is so celebrated, and 
which are the specialty of its art, are all, to a modern 
trained eye at least, conventional, stiff, formal. It took 
later centuries of half pagan and classic study to give 
them that perfection and finish which has made them 
the highest order of painting for churches. The Byzan- 
tine architecture, which, with the aid of Roman cul- 
ture, grew into such glory and splendor under the 
worldlier influences of Venice, is here constrained, 
primitive, and humble. There is no splendor, no 
grandeur, no magnificence, little of luxury and cultiva- 
tion. In fact, Ravenna, in its social and aesthetic pre- 
sentment, is the legitimate development of the social 
ideas and Essenic teachings of the New Testament, 
which declare war against luxury, refinement, elegance, 
personal ease, temporal power, riches, all that goes to 
make up the civilization or, as it is called in the New 
Testament, "the spirit" of this world. 

Ravenna was a stronghold of Arianism, which has 
left its traces here in Arian crosses imbedded firmly in 
the walls and in the records of the wanderings of the 
ashes of some of the dead emperors and leaders who 
had embraced this faith. The Roman Church, on re- 
gaining power, not being, perhaps, honestly satisfied in 
its own mind of its power to execute its threat of 
burning their souls, took out its vengeance in violating 



EA VENN A. 327 

their graves. Theodoric, however, after some adven- 
tures, got his bones carried back to their original rest- 
ing-place prepared by his daughter, and he now sleeps 
peacefully in the fields outside of the walls, in a perfect 
stronghold of a mausoleum. I visited this last castle 
of the old warrior by moonlight, and, as you entered 
the vaulted and covered outway and passed the moat 
and ascended a kind of drawbridge-stairway, now per- 
manent, you felt how savage were the instincts of the 
Middle Ages, when a distinguished and honored and 
powerful ruler had to fight for the repose of his ashes 
against a Church which professed to have the exclusive 
monopoly of teaching on earth the doctrines of Christ 
and the gospel of peace. 

This tomb is a round tower of solid masonry, against 
which even a modern cannon-ball would fall harmless. 
It is surmounted by a single block of stone of enormous 
size and weight, which answers as a roof. The whole 
structure looks as if it were carved out of rock, or 
placed there by giants rather than built by men. 
Within this dense mass of stone — like the hollow for a 
kernel in a shell — there is a small altar and a huge 
sarcophagus. There were no guards to watch the ashes 
now ; no janitor even to break the solemn proprieties 
of the place by a Imiigry whining for pour-boire. So, 
finding the massive grate, which opened to let air and 
dim light into the dungeon of the altar of the tomb, we 
dropped through its iron bars some lighted matches : 
tlie stone floor fortunately was dry ; the shadows fell 
quickly back before the leaping lines of ephemeral 
flame, and for a moment we had all to ourselves a pri- 
vate illumination of the mausoleum of Theodoric the 
Great. 



EOME. 



28^ 329 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

ROME THE CENTRE. 

The Eternal City — The Spell of Eome. 

When one first reaches the Eternal City it seems 
almost hopeless to write of Rome. All the centuries, 
all the civilizations, all the religions seem to centre here, 
and the mind refuses to grasp in symmetrical concep- 
tion the mighty whole. Although but a small town 
now of only a quarter of a million of inhabitants, Rome 
has a wonderfully cosmopolitan atmosphere, by virtue 
both of historic tradition and of present fact. 

Her ruins are the record of successive strata of civil- 
izations, stretching back into the shadows of history 
until the shadows are lost in the darkness of total night. 
Her palaces are built on the seats of lost empires ; her 
cathedrals on the buried temples of abandoned faiths. 
As a matter of fact, during what is substantially known 
history, she has been the imperial city of the world, 
ruling it either by arms, learning, or ecclesiastical 
power, and the monuments of her past glories are 
splendid arid instructive even in ruin. 

To-day the men of influence of all countries, and 
of all followings, come to her to learn. And so it lias 
been for centuries. Since the last two or three hundred 
years, when travel was possible, there has hardly been 
a distinguished name in Europe that has not in some 
way left its record in Rome. There is not to-day a 
better centre to meet the controlling men of all the 
world, one by one, than Rome ; and it has been so for 
years and years. Sooner or later they all come, either 
in the glory of power, or to study in art, letters, religion, 

* 331 



332 ROME. 

or statesmanship, or driven by the stress of misfortune, 
to die. Indeed, the tombs of Rome are more eloquent, 
perhaps, than anything else of her world-wide rule and 
sympathy. You are startled every now and then by 
meeting the graves of men of distant ages, of far-off 
countries, of strange faiths. John Lascaris, of Constan- 
tinople, found rest here, as did Charles Edward, the 
young pretender to the throne of England, and his 
brother. Cardinal York. Daniel O'Connell, the great 
Irishman, gave his heart to the keeping of Rome. 
Shelley, Keats, and Howitt lie near together in the 
Protestant burial-ground outside the walls, where sleep 
with them brethren from Greece and Russia and Amer- 
ica and Asia. In fact, this little graveyard, set apart 
as an exclusion, has become the catholic resting-place 
of all the world save those of thQ Roman faith. An- 
gelica Kauffmann is buried in a chapel only a few houses 
from where I write. In that magnificent mausoleum, 
the crypt of St. Peter's, are the burial-urns of the three 
last princes of the unfortunate house of Stuart, who lost 
the crown of England ; of Queen Christina, of Sweden; 
the Emperor Otho II., and others of the great ones of 
earth of every tongue and clime. The central building 
of the powerful Jesuit order is the grand and fitting 
tomb of Loyola. St. Peter and St. Paul, or what re- 
ligious tradition accepts as their bodies, sleep in the very 
heart of the greatest church of all Christendom, and so 
all through the city. Great basilicas at almost every 
corner are the tombs of great men who have founded 
states or orders, while out the wonderful aisle of the 
Appian Way generals and senators and magnates of old 
Rome, and their friends or victims, the kings of for- 
gotten nations, are marshalled for miles and miles in 
unknown and despoiled graves. 

Even in the character of to-day, that present which 
seems so infinitesimally small in the presence of her 
endless past, Rome keeps her claim for catholicity and 
world-wide range of interest and control. The features 



ROME THE CENTRE. 333 

of cosmopolitan influence and connection are stamped 
everywhere. On the streets Greek, Jew, and barbarian 
jostle each other. In the hotels, among the ruins, in 
the churches, you hear every tongue and see the men of 
all nations. Not the least of the impressive features of 
St. Peter's is the seemingly endless succession of the 
confessional-boxes, each one labelled with a different 
tongue, until all the ends of the earth are provided for. 
It seemed a little thing at first, but as you wali^ed until 
wearied through arched aisles, ever on your left the 
perpetually-recurring confessional-niche, — pro lingua 
Illyrlca — p7^o lingua Hispana — p7^o lingua Anglica^ etc., 
— you felt the force of a claim in greater strength than 
any words could formulate it. 

Then again, in a visible assertion of imperial rule in 
the faith of the world, is the great institution of the 
Propaganda, with its massive central building, its poly- 
glottal printing-press, whence issue books in all tongues 
and languages, and its schools of priests for all nations. 
There are Koman Catholic churches, too, and colleges 
for all peoples, not merely of the Latin races, but for 
those of Scotland, the United States, England, and the 
essentially Protestant blood of the North. The print- 
ing-office of the Propaganda is particularly rich in 
Oriental type, — an evidence of its wide range and ex- 
haustless scope. 

Even outside of the Roman Catholic Church, which 
fora thousand years has held Rome in its exclusive grasp, 
the cosmopolitan impress and representation here are 
strong. Of course the foreign travel is from the whole 
world. You see not only priests in the national vest- 
ments of all nations and of all shades and colors of 
skins, but you daily meet educated visitors from all 
parts of the globe. At a dinner-party in good society 
here one frequently hears four or five languages, and 
generally two or three. The literature of the book- 
stores is consequently German, French, English, Italian, 
Spanish, with a sprinkling of the less frequently used 



334 ROME. 

tongues. The servants are forced to know at least 
French, and the tradesmen attempt bravely to answer 
in any language in which you address them. 

To-day there are Hebrew synagogues and six or eight 
Protestant churches, German, English, and American. 
When one remembers that for centuries the Roman 
Catholic service has been the only form tolerated, and 
that the traditions of ages have been against any other, 
it can be seen how wide the doors are already opened, 
and how the last vestige of mediaeval provincialism and 
insularity is disappearing. Under the reigns of Victor 
Emmanuel and Humbert, indeed, there is practical 
liberty of faith. Should a Chinaman now wish to wor- 
ship God in Rome, in his own way and as his fathers 
have taught him, I suppose he has the same civil right 
to do so as he has in San Francisco, and I think he 
would probably be as honestly protected in that right 
as in California, nor would there likely be any popular 
interference with his devotions. 

These Protestant churches, of course, are, in the 
main, for the use of the foreign and travelling popula- 
tion of the city, but so, for that matter, is all Rome. 
Its luxuries, its best accommodations, its galleries, its 
ruins, are all now for the enjoyment of the Northern 
barbarians, who, from far-off countries, press in to-day, 
—not as of old as soldiers, but peacefully as tourists and 
occupying the land. Without its travellers Rome would 
be in eternal sleep. 

It is this thoroughly cosmopolitan character — taking 
in its embrace the whole world of to-day and stretch- 
ing back through the ages in one continuous line farther 
than recorded history — that gives Rome its peculiar 
charm to men of thought and influence. Hardly a man 
of power or education in all history who has not been 
here and left in some way the record of his impression. 
And in a country whose literature of travel embraces 
such names as Addison, Ruskin, Shelley, the i>oet Gray, 
Hemans, Hawthorne, Hi 1 Hard, Howitt, Dickens, Dis- 



ROME THE CENTRE. 335 

raell, Cardinal Wiseman, Byron, Goethe, Bunsen, 
Niebuhr, Hans Andersen, Ampere, About, Montaigne, 
Chateaubriand, De Stael, Castelar, Taine, Gautier, and 
farther back Chrysostom and St. Paul and Cicero, is 
it any wonder that one feels appalled at ever attempting 
to write, and hardly knows how to begin, or where? 

It is this greatness of Rome, swallowing up time and 
history, which, like the infinity of the ocean, draws all 
men to it with an irresistible fascination, as if it were a 
pleasure to lose themselves in its limitless existence, and 
which creates that insatiable longing to return, to be 
forever in it and of it, which every strong man who 
ever saw the Eternal City has confessed. This inde- 
finable sense of Rome which takes possession of one 
witli a kind of pantheistic force, and often by some odd 
power of association involuntarily floods his whole 
being at the mere passing memory of its laughing-eyed 
beggars, its incense-smelling churches, its corporeal 
smells wandering from dirty courts, its aromatic Pln- 
cian or the sunny, humble Trasteyere, — this strange 
compelling sense is the evidence of the spell of its his- 
toric incantation. And those blessed ones to whom it 
comes are they who have drank of the real waters of 
the fountain of Trevi. 

KOME. 



336 ROME. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 



SAINT PETER S, A^T> ITALIAN PREACHING. 

The First Chukch of the World — Tsr the Shade of a 
Forest of Marble Columns — Modern Indulgences — - 
The Pallas Athene of Rome — Italian Preaching — An 
Educating Pulpit. 

I AM not going to attempt a pen-painting of St. 
Peter's, the first and greatest church of Christendom. 
It would take a volume to merely index its wealth of 
present treasure and range of suggestive and historic 
association, or picture the outlines of its magnitude. 
Even then one could hardly achieve a conception of its 
magnificence and grandeur unless he had something to 
measure it by, and in our country as yet, unfortunately, 
we have not. 

Let me suggest, however, a point from which one 
might begin to work up to some approximate idea of its 
size. Its effect and historical relation are something 
entirely apart from that and higher. In all the United 
States I suppose the largest and most imposing pile 
sprung from a single design is " The Public Buildings," 
at Broad and Market Streets, in the city of Philadelphia. 
This great structure has a base of four hundred and fifty 
feet by four hundred and fifty feet — a grand square — and 
is to be over five hundred feet high. Now, you could 
take up this entire immense mass of building and set it 
bodily down inside of the piazza or portico which is the 
magnificent threshold of St. Peter's; and then you 
would have so much room to spare that you could throw 
around in the crevices such of our home churches as 
those of Holy Trinity at either New York or Philadel- 



ST. PETER'S, AND ITALIAN PREACHING. 337 

phia, and they would be lost and hidden in the shade 
of the corners. Even our longitudinal Capitol at Wash- 
ington with all its extensions could be placed within this 
wonderful portico without materially interfering with 
the passage-way. 

This porch or piazza is five hundred and eighty-eight 
feet wide by one thousand and thirty-four long, and 
some authorities give even greater dimensions. It is 
flanked on either side by a magnificent forest of marble 
columns, arranged in semicircular avenues and roofed. 
Under these pillars, of which with the massive pilasters 
there are some three hundred and fifty, there is per- 
petual shade and coolness even throughout the whole 
summer's blaze of an Italian sun, for sunlight never 
penetrates their cool recesses. And this was their in- 
tention, as the Latin superscription legended above them 
eloquently tells : '^ A tabernacle for a shade in the day- 
time and a security and covert from the whirlwind and 
from the rain." And all this they literally are to-day. 
More than this, with the immense fa§ade, this noble 
approach serves to hide all the adjacent and rear build- 
ings of the place, and one draws towards the entrance 
of St. Peter's without seeing a single other structure in 
the world. It stands alone in the heart of a great city. 
Among the buildings very happily thus kept out of 
sight is the iniquitous "Palace of the Holy Office," or, 
in English, The Inquisition. In the centre of this por- 
tico rises tlie needle-like spire of an Egyptian obelisk, 
one of the earliest of religious monuments, erected 
originally to the sun, now a captive adorning the tem- 
ple of the God who made the sun. Around it play 
colossal fountains, which cast up massive jets of water 
that, after reaching a height over that- of an ordinary 
American three-story house, return downward in deli- 
cious spray, swept by the winds over a vast area of the 
stone-flagged pavement of the piazza, keeping it moist 
and cool. 

All this k but the threshold and entrance to a won- 
F w 29 



338 R^^E- 

derful church, whose nave is a magnificent sweep of 
over six hundred feet in length, in whose transepts you 
could place cathedrals, and where the chapels in the 
side aisles are as large as a common American church. 
Withal, everything within is pleasing and harmonious, 
light and beautiful, and so symmetrical that, until you 
think and compare, you do not see or feel the awful 
size. The baby cherubs that hold up the basins of 
holy water are colossal giants when you note the girth 
of their limbs and compare them with those of the 
human form. The doves are enormous birds, and the 
angels recall the far-ofP shadowy days in the morning 
of the world when the sons of God came down to the 
fair daughters of men. The surpassing splendor of 
this great temple, which gathers up in its walls a vast 
congregation of churches, its uncounted wealth of mar- 
bles and precious stones, its lofty arches, through which 
you ever catch new vistas of cathedral grandeur, its 
labyrinth of the tombs of the great ones of the earth, 
its storied sculptures, its enduring mosaics, its endless 
altars laden with gold and gleaming with sacred lights, 
all seem to lift it out of the limited range of the handi- 
work of man and up to the proportions of some great 
work of nature. In ^^ God's first temple" to-day you 
feel '^the primeval forest,^' the mysterious influence of 
rock and water and endless nature. 

While there is a studied attempt in the interior dec- 
orations of St. Peter's to assert and record the sectional 
characteristics of the Koman Church, particularly its 
claim to temporal sovereignty and its historic struggle 
against national independence, still the general effect is 
so overpowering and grand that you lose in it the sense 
of these blemishes just as you do of all petty details. 
Protestants, at all events, ought not to quarrel with St. 
Peter's, for it is the cradle of the Reformation. The 
immense burden of its construction, — the main building 
alone cost over fifty million dollars, and the annual re- 
pairs and keeping up now demand forty thousand dol- 



ST. PETER'S, AND ITALIAN PREACHING. 339 

lars per year, — the immense burden of this construction 
at a time when money was more costly than now led 
to the sale of indulgences as a source of revenue, which 
abuse was the popular lever of the Reformation. It 
stiffened up Luther to take the decisive step, and 
gave him something with which to go before the 
people. 

A word here about indulgences, the profuse adver- 
tisements of which over the church doors are one of the 
first things which strike the ordinary Protestant travel- 
ler and give him a slight moral shock. The scandalous 
and public abuse of the system, which gave birth to the 
Protestant development, is long since gone here. In- 
dulgences are not any more issued on paper and de- 
livered, except, perhaps, in occasional and exceptional 
cases. In legal phrase, they take effect, not by delivery, 
"but })y operation of law." Whenever the conditions 
are fulfilled they inure to the benefit of the sinner. 
These "conditions'^ are the essence of the whole thing, 
and are what are not popularly understood by the non- 
Catholic world, which commonly looks on an indul- 
gence either as a bare license to sin or an absolute and 
unqualified remission of sin. The modern Roman in- 
dulgence, in its operative clause, is strictly limited in 
its own terms, just like the "absolution'' of the Protest- 
ant Episcopal and some other Protestant denomina- 
tions. It is only an authoritative declaration to those 
who perform certain acts of devotion that their sins will 
be forgiven them on condition of true repentance. This 
"condition" is the consideration. Whether the average 
Roman worshipper understands the condition is another 
question. This condition is, however, the theory and 
technical definition of "indulgence" as officially giv^en 
here to-day, and we can hardly fairly go beyond that. 
The advantages accrue only to such as truly repent of 
their sins. 

Traces of the old abuse and of the popular miscon- 
ception, however, abound everywhere. Being an 



340 ROME. 

irredeemable promise as far as the Chnrcli is concerned, 
— that is, a promise which some one else must pay or 
redeem — the thing works out exactly like an irredeem- 
able issue of paper money. There is an uncontrolled 
and reckless emission of them of all sizes and values, 
from one day up to, I believe, in one case, one hundred 
thousand years. Rival orders, rival churches, rival 
chapels, compete in granting them, and the whole town 
is flooded with them. The devotional element of Italy 
not being mathematical, the poor peasants will work 
away, repeating prayers, going up steps on their knees, 
making pilgrimages to shrines, etc., for a thirty days' 
indulgence, when the same acts, differently directed, 
would bring them the same results for a thousand 
years. 

Again, practically there is a commercial flavor to 
the whole transaction, and the contract is often drawn up 
witli such looseness as not only to make it bristle with 
problems to a legal mind, but to suggest in equity a 
" false pretence." In several churches in Rome, built 
under French auspices, you read this official declara- 
tion : " Ten days' indulgence to all who pray for the 
soul of the King of France granted by bull, or decree, 

of Pope , A.D. ," many hundred years ago. I 

suppose some king of France in former days sold away 
the liberties of his subjects or gave away their moneys 
and took his pay in this coin. But who is to be 
prayed for, the unnamed king who made the bargain, 
or the living king reioning at the time the prayer is 
offered? And, if the latter, is it a personal boon or a 
franchise of the French crown ? And, if this, does it 
inure to President Grevy now, as successor, or to the 
National Assembly, more or less infidel, or to the body 
of the French people, the ultimate and collective sov- 
ereignty of France ? Or has it utterly lapsed, and does 
the simple Italian peasant lose his ten days entirely? 
Or does it matter at all whether the peasant has any 
idea of what or whom he is praying for ? 



ST. PETER'S, AND ITALIAN PREACHING. 34I 

There are some curious phases in the religious life 
of Rome. The dominant power of the old polytheistic 
faith crops out all the time. The groups of minor gods 
displaced by Constantine reappear still in the popular 
saints. Apollo with his arrows survives in the beauti- 
ful youth, St. Sebastian, shot to death by Roman 
archers near the Colosseum, and always painted or 
sculptured with the shafts from the bow in his body. 
I have seen the Virgin Mary in the old churches of the 
Trastevere and in the ant^ient city of Pistoja with the 
moon depicted at her feet, the old symbol of Venus, 
and thought of Milton's — 

" Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horn." 

The divine honors paid to the emperors in the cor- 
rupt decadence of Rome are reproduced in the doctrine 
of the infallibility of the Pope. There are saints, too, 
for the seasons, saints for cities and provinces, saints for 
lovers, saints for harvest-time, saints for the horses, 
saints to be invoked for diseases, just as in the familiar 
mythology of our school-books, and shrines and special 
altars for their worship in these special characters. 

But the most striking development of this tendency 
is comparatively recent; at least, its " push'' is modern, 
and of our very time. Rome is to-day as thoroughly 
dedicated to the Virgin Mary as ever Athens was to 
Pallas. The Christian Roman of this generation asks 
of the Virgin just what the patriotic Athenian of classic 
times asked of Minerva, and looks to her for the same 
aid and protection. Her churches are far more numer- 
ous than those of any other dedication, and her altars 
in the churches are those most popular and frequented. 
Her images work the miracles and have the throngs of 
worshippers. 

But the modern worship of the Virgin is not a mere 
popular impulse which miglit be apologized for on one 
hand or explained away philosophically on the other. 



342 ROME. 

The order comes from the Vatican, and is a part of a 
policy deliberately adopted and boldly lived up to. 
Tlie Church of the country avows it and glories in it. 
On the doors of the churches of Rome there appeared 
in May of this year official ecclesiastical notices, signed 
by high prelates, speaking of this city proudly as 
*^ Rome, the city of Mary, and Rome, the city of Jesus," 
giving to the woman in written language the precedence 
Avhich she always has here in the hearts of her wor- 
shippers. 

The religious Roman art of this generation will go 
into history, too, as distinctively consecrated to this new 
deity. Pius IX. raised in the central Piazza di Es- 
pagna a towering obelisk in honor of the triumph of 
the dogma of the immaculate conception. He panelled 
the tribunal of St. Peter's Avith a great tablet com- 
memorating its official promulgation by the (Ecumen- 
ical Council, and recorded on side panels the names 
of the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops of all the 
world voting for the measure. He added to the cele- 
brated stanze of the Vatican — a suite of state rooms 
frescoed by the great masters — an additional room 
wholly devoted to the history of the new dogma, its 
passage in the council, its promulgation by himself, 
and the reception of the news in heaven ! On one of 
the fagades of the square base of the obelisk just men- 
tioned there is an attempt to represent in marble the 
very act of the conception of the Blessed Virgin by the 
Holy Ghost, — a peculiar but characteristic illustration 
of the morbid bent of the Roman ecclesiastical mind. 

Every Roman girl, the Italian women tell me, is 
baptized Maria. She may have as many other names 
as her parents choose to give her, but Maria is obligatory. 

Did classic Athens ever do as much as all this for 
her Pallas ? 

I close with a word on the way they preach in Italy, 
which has some decided advantages over our usage. 



ST, PETER'S, AND ITALIAN PREACHING. 343 

While the sermon has become the central feature in 
Protestant worsliip instead of a mere incident, as in the 
old Catholic service, it is not a little singular that the 
preaching in the Roman churches should be so much 
freer and more natural than with us, and, of course, as 
a consequence, more effective. In the first place, it is 
more dramatic. In the churches of Italy a platform 
or scaffoldino; of some kind is often built in front or 
out of the pulpit. On this the preacher stands in full- 
length view of his hearers, whom he addresses all 
around, facing at Avill in any direction. On this plat- 
form, a little to the rear of the speaker, there is gene- 
rally a high crucifix, a chair in which he may rest by 
sitting from time to time as he talks, and sometimes 
a little table for a glass of water, a Bible, or a handker- 
chief, but not for manuscript. I have never seen a 
Roman Catholic priest read a sermon. This platform, 
which is raised six or eight feet from the floor, is, in 
some churches, hung with tapestry, illustrating sacred 
legends. The whole makes a pleasing picture, and 
gives the s])eaker a much greater freedom and power 
of oratorical action than the rigid, straight-line, box- 
pulpits of our land. 

And the freedom of the people is equal. AVhen 
the sermon is about to begin they all settle themselves 
around in chairs in the best positions to hear comforta- 
bly. The churches are so large that a vast audience 
can be thus accommodated, each in his chair, but in 
irregular groups, families or friends together. When 
the audiences number thousands they become more 
compact, and around the seated hearers are dense 
crowds of men and women standing. No one is obliged 
here by stress of custom or the pressure of respectability 
to hear a sermon. When the service is over " church 
is out,^' and you can go, unless you think the preacher 
has something to say worth listening to. You are as 
free as at an American political meeting. If the ser- 
mon is dull or stupid you can leave at any moment. 



344 ROME. 

You can go out of tlie building, or walk through its 
grand aisles, crowded with sculpture and paintings and 
liistoric tombs. At your convenience you can go back 
to the speaker when he grows more eloquent than the 
tombs or master-pieces of art. If he is not equal to 
the situation, you can let him alone. 

In fact, the service exactly resembles our political 
meetings in the freedom and mobility of the audience. 
The preacher holds his hearers by his abilities and his 
eloquence and not by outside force. If he has nothing 
to say, or cannot give his sacred message as it should be 
given, he has no hearers, and no opportunity, therefore, 
to discredit his high oiBce, or to make the Gospel dis- 
tasteful through his own weakness or ignorance. It is 
just to the discipline of this training that I ascribe the 
general eloquence of the Roman clergy and the popular 
impression made by their preaching. They have the 
same incentive to speak well that the American poli- 
tician has when addressing his fellow-citizens, or the 
American lecturer, who must even do more, — attract 
people to pay for the privilege of hearing him. 

Often the scene during sermon-time in an Italian 
church is a very picturesque one. Women sit nursing 
their babes in comfortable cane chairs ; others are on 
their knees in silent prayer ; little children are playing 
quietly among the listening groups at the chancels of 
adjoining altars ; squads of ecclesiastical students, in 
bright scarlet or blue gowns, drop in on their way to or 
from college to hear the noted orators, and remain as 
long as their critical judgments are satisfied -j soldiers in 
uniform hang on the outskirts, and men come and go 
as if the sermon were a thing of life and interest and 
not a dead body of words. In brief, the hearers listen 
or the preacher has no hearers, and in either case there 
is not the loss of a sermon. 

The average American clergyman, accustomed to hold 
his audience by some force outside of himself, will prob- 
ably object to all this as irreverence, but I do not see 



ST. PETER'S, AND ITALIAN PREACHING. 345 

that it is. I do not think it is more irreverent for chil- 
dren to play in the house of God than to be tortured 
there by unnatural confinement on high benches that 
drive the blood out of the legs. I do not believe it is 
more irreverent for poor women to nurse their children 
in the house of God than to stay away because they 
have no one to nurse them at home. And, finally, it is 
not more irreverent to get up and leave in the middle 
of a soporific sermon than to go to sleep. Moreover, 
if this honest freedom develops a higher order of ser- 
mons, it is the very highest kind of reverence. I 
notice further, on the question of reverence, that when 
the Roman priest is about to begin to preach he kneels 
on the open platform for a few moments in silent 
prayer, and the whole congregation kneels and prays 
with him. 

As a training-school I can think of nothing better 
adapted to develop the oratorical power and real effi- 
ciency of the preacher than this custom. It is a practi- 
cal use of the law of the survival of the fittest. It is 
exactly the training which our secular speakers un- 
dergo, and those of them who are not speakers soon 
ascertain it, while the conventional preacher never finds 
it out. 

It is customary for us to speak and think of the Ro- 
man Catholic form of worship as rigid and " formal.'^ 
It is, in fact, in its whole ritual and service, the most 
flexible in the world, and it is this very power of self- 
adjustment and adaptation that has given it its great 
hold on all times, all countries, and all peoples. 

KOME. 



346 ROME. 



CHAPTER XXXyil. 

THE PANTHEON. 

The Oldest House of Contiis"uous HuMAisr "Worship iisr the 
Civilized World — Graves of Raphael and Victor Em- 
manuel — Old and New — Modern Paganism — Cleaning 
UP THE Pantheon. 

When you enter the Pantheon, and passing by the 
cheap adornment of pictures and altars look through 
the floating dome up to the sky " where God sitteth 
eternal in the heavens/^ you are in the oldest place of 
human worship in the civilized world which yet retains 
its ancient form and structure. The very building, as 
it stands to-day, is the one in which the vanished gods 
of classic Rome were worshipped with sacrifice and in- 
cense and prayer before Christ was born in Bethlehem, 
and it is the only spared monument of the kind that 
comes down from before the Christian era. 

Robbed, plundered, defaced, now closed and voiceless 
in the transition of faiths, now filled with soldiers, a 
fortress fought around by rival Popes proclaiming 
themselves the vicars of a God and new gospel of 
peace, now given over to neglect and profane uses, the 
debris of mediaeval night and ruin rising around its 
base and portico and threatening to bury it with the 
ages, it still stands as it stood before the angels sang 
the hymn of the nativity in Judea, and men worship 
God within its walls. In its endless associations and 
its perfect beauty, which cannot be torn away from it, 
it is the most eflPective and suggestive of all the temples 
of Christendom to-day. In the old days when the fires 
on its altar were kindled to Jupiter, its dead brick walls 
of massive masonry were outlined with pure white 



THE PANTHEON. 347 

marble, glittering in the sun and soft in the moonlight. 
Popes and princes have carried this off to embellish 
their palaces and enrich their favorites. Its wonderful 
dome blazed within and without with brass and bronze. 
Emperor Constantine came to Rome between 600 and 
700 A.D., to worship at the shrines and adore the relics 
which then had found a home in the Pantheon, and 
balanced his devotion by stripping and carrying off 
shiploads of its metal wealth. The plunder was com- 
])leted by Pope Urban VIII., who took what was left 
to build a gaudy baldachino for a chnrch and cast can- 
nons for the castle of San Angeh), — four hundred and 
fifty thousand pounds. Benedict XIV. committed the 
latest spoliation, in taking away all the precious marbles 
that lined the vast attic. 

Nevertheless, so grand is the conception of this build- 
ing, and so perfect its proportions, that you do not see 
or feel the loss of these incidents. The temple stands 
there yet as it came from the brain of its unknown 
architect. You do not see the mutilation and scars of 
the warring centuries, just as you do not see the tawdry 
ornaments and wretched tin crowns and hearts and gew- 
gaws witli which modern Italian devotion has desecrated 
its altars and defaced its walls. The temple crushes 
out its ignorant priests to-day, as it has defied time 
itself in the past, and stands sublime in the grandeur 
of its simplicity. 

This most effective of all buildings for worship is, 
in its interior, a simple dome, supported by a plain, 
round wall ; no corridors, no naves, no transepts, — 
nothing to break the force and simplicity of idea. 
There is but one great door, whose massive bronze folds 
close in with the line of the wall and seem part of it. 
There are no windows, but the light streams in from a 
great circular opening in the centre of the dome, twenty- 
eight feet in diameter, never closed, flooding every 
recess and every portion witli an equal ray. 

There is something wonderfully effective in this idea, 



348 ROME. 

which puts the temple, as it were, in direct coramuuica- 
tion with the skies of heaven, and makes it already the 
threshold and vestibule of the other world. It im- 
presses one at once as the natural conception of a place 
of worship. This world, wdth all its little noise and 
struggles, is utterly shut out and closed from you. 
You look up and see the clouds with the birds in them 
sail by. The rains of heaven fall on the porphyry pave- 
ment at your feet and lie there. They are of God and 
come into His house. Or the warm sunshine streams 
in and rests on some chosen altar, — a golden pathway 
on which the angels ascend and descend. In the night 
the moon and the stars look in and watch with men the 
still shrines and voiceless tombs. 

It is a temple where God is in communion with man 
and speaks without a liturgy or formulated ceremony. 

There is such a unity of effect, with nothing to dis- 
tract or divide attention, it is so light and cheerful 
and calm and loving, that you feel you are in the house 
of the living God and loving Father, and not the God 
of death and the grave, — the feeling which steals over 
one in the gloomy shadows of the Gothic cathedral. 

It is a humiliating reflection which bears down on me 
every time I enter the impressive portal of this wonder- 
ful temple that what is grand here, what is elevating, 
what is beautiful, is pagan ; what is false, what is de- 
grading, what is ignorant, is of our time and age. The 
religion which is in the building was put in by its 
classic builders ; the superstition and vulgarity we are 
responsible for. 

I have attempted to outline the simple grandeur and 
majesty of this temple as it sprung into life, — the best 
development of ancient Roman art and civilization. 
Let us see how the priest of to-day has dealt with the 
finest legacy of the old faith. 

We will pass by the plunder of columns and marble 
and bronze for private uses, — the deliberate mutilation, 
the wholesale military profanation of the church by 



THE PANTHEON. 349 

bishops. They may be charged to the civilization of 
the time, although a Church that claims the temporal 
rule of the world should be held responsible for its 
civilization. 

Let us inspect the nineteenth-century contributions to 
this time-honored temple. As you enter, the first un- 
pleasant sight which is apt to catch the eye is a dirty 
mass of white and black drapery, fastened up to some 
])illars just to the right of the main altar. They are 
the muslin banners and faded, dusty wreaths of some 
civil and political societies, and an object of much in- 
terest to the native Italians who throng the temple. 
An old sergeant or veteran in a half-civil, half-military 
uniform and not very neat or soldierly in appearance or 
carriage, keeps a kind of slouching guard over the spot. 
This gloomy and rather shabby pile of crape, muslin, 
and mechanical-looking immortelles, so common in 
Latin-Europe, is the grave of Victor Emmanuel. It is 
a great grave in a great spot, but we would make it far 
more impressive in one of our churches. 

Around the niches are paintings of various scenes 
and quality. The old masters are not here. A ghastly 
life-size representation of the crucifixion in some kind 
of dark-red material, with a crown of thorns and a real 
white cloth around the loins, adorns one panel. A 
number of the altars have cheap tin votive offerings 
nailed up around them. Others have small common 
engravings or prints framed and hung up or placed 
near them. 

The altar which attracts most attention, however, 
both from priest and people, and before which one 
nearly always finds some persons in prayer, is that of a 
popular Madonna, — the third one from the left of the 
main or high altar. It is a singular fact that certain 
Madonnas here, sometimes oil-paintings, two or three of 
whom have spoken, and sometimes marble statues, be- 
come popular favorites and the subjects of great adora- 
tion, to the entire exclusion of their neighbors. There 

30 



350 ROME, 

are several other Madonnas in the Pantheon, but I never 
saw prayers said to them, whereas I have several times 
heard mass being said in front of this one, and never 
saw her without some one kneelino; before her. 

This statue is the altar-piece of an altar under which 
Raphael is buried, and was made by a friend and pupil 
for the tomb of his master. It is a much finer image, 
therefore, as a work of art than many that are the 
subjects of popular adoration. Nevertheless, this fine 
sculpture has a metal crown on its head, a coral neck- 
lace on its neck, and a tin heart tied on its arm. The 
marble babe in the arms of the Madonna has also a ffilt 
crown and a petticoat of embroidered gray cloth around 
its stone legs. A rude arch of tin shapes — votive offer- 
ings sold in the shops for a penny or two — framed the 
entire altar. Hung up on the side of the niche, over 
the grave of Raphael, were two or three most wretched 
daubs of paintings, representing some cures in a hospi- 
tal-ward effected by the miraculous intervention of the 
Virgin, and apparently painted by the patients. After 
saying their prayers in front of this image, the devout 
worshippers generally kiss its feet. A rude framed 
print of the image was placed at its base, and I have 
seen peasant women take that down too and kiss it and 
teach their children to do the same. 

Such is the altar which is the centre of the nineteenth- 
century worship in the Pantheon. 

I must add an incident illustrative of the curious con- 
dition of mind of this people, by reason of which no 
incongruity in the house of God seems to offend their 
taste or feeling, provided that it is not intended as de- 
liberate irreverence. One day while I was in the Pan- 
theon, mass was being said at this altar of the Madonna, 
only a half-dozen of worshippers assisting. Inside of 
the chancel of the main altar, only a few yards off and 
very near its base, stood an open flask of native wine, 
half drank. It belonged to some workmen who were 
cleaning the rear of the altar, and the rasping sound of 



THE PANTHEON. 351 

whose scraping and sanding mingled with the intoning 
of the priests at the adjoining shrine, and was quite as 
audible through the church. While the whole thing 
was grating and offensive to us, it was evidently not 
meant as irrev^erence, and did not annoy either the wor- 
shippers or the officiating priests. 

It is to be said, too, for the credit of the clergy in 
immediate charge of the church of the Pantheon, and 
in their behalf, that the decoration of the altars and 
walls is in better taste and less offensive than that of a 
large number of the churches of Rome. The altar-fur- 
nishing is mainly limited to candles of plain style. 
There are no wax figures, no glass cases, and no skulls 
or bones or other horrors. An instinct of reverence, 
perhaps, has saved it from much of the trumpery and 
tinsel, and gewgaws and frippery images, and bad mil- 
linery which disfigure many other churches here and 
seem to be the fitting devotional aids to the ignorant and 
superstitious faith of the place. 

Of old the Pantheon stood in an elegant and spacious 
quarter of the city, and was raised on a slight elevation, 
which gave its symmetrical form proper effect. To-day 
it is found in the distant and most squalid portion of 
Rome — the Ghetto, from which it is not far off, ex- 
cepted — and below the level of the ground. The flight 
of steps by which it was originally approached is buried 
absolutely, and you step down from the wretched 
modern piazza on to the floor of the ancient portico, the 
finest of its kind in the world. It is the centre of a 
network of narrow and confusing Roman streets, many 
of them not the width of our alleys, lined continuously 
with high stone buildings, densely packed with people, 
full of foul smells and offensive dirt of all kinds. Old 
houses lean up against a portion of the walls and are 
built into it, and beggars camp all day around and 
among its Corinthian columns. During the Middle 
Ages these grand columns had booths and stalls built 
into them, and vegetables and cheap meats were sold 



352 ROME. 

literally in the gates. How has the glory of the old 
temple departed ! 

The proportions of the main lines of this building 
are as wonderful in their simplicity as the building is 
itself in its effect. The interior, remember, is a pure 
rotunda, simply covered with a dome. 

Diameter of rotunda 142 feet. 

From floor to top of dome 143 " 

Height of wall of rotunda Ilh " 

Height of dome 7l} " 

or just one-half of the whole elevation. The diameter 
is given from inside measurements. The walls of the 
Pantheon are said to be 20 feet wide. The great dome 
of St. Peter's is 139 feet in diameter at its base, 3 feet 
less than the Pantheon, but it is vastly higher, the dis- 
tance from the top of the cross on the dome to the floor 
of the church being 448 feet. It was Michael Angelo's 
boast, in building St. Peter's, that he would swing the 
Pantheon in the air, and he has done it. 

But the Pantheon is a grander church than St. Peter's 
to-day. It is a wonder, while St. Peter's is an eccle- 
siastical labyrinth, and, greater than all, it is the place 
in which God has been continuously worshipped for 
nineteen hundred years. 

EOME. 



PRISON OF ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER. 353 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

PRISON OF ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER. 

Twenty-five Centuries of Dissolving Kingdoms and 
Faiths on One Spot — The Confusion of Ruin — St. Paul 
AND St. Peter in the Political Prison of Rome — The 
Mamertine Dungeons — The Church of the Ara Cceli — 
The Altar of the Capitol. 

Wandering through an obscure portion of the city 
to-day, on my way for an afternoon dreaai in tlie Colos- 
seum, I came suddenly upon a rude out-house of some 
kind, leanino; ai^ainst and built into a tenement house 
for modern Romans of tlie poorer sort, over the grated 
doorway of which was inscribed in still clear, legible 
letters the Latin legend, "Blessed are the dead who die 
in the Lord.'^ It was the entrance probably to the 
vault of some ruined and forgotten Christian church 
which, itself, had likely been built over and out of 
some destroyed temple of old, for it stood near and in 
sight of tlie Forum. To-day the cheerful and airy tem- 
ple of classic faith, beautiful in symmetry, proportion, 
and graceful Corinthian columns, — the gloomy church 
of mediaeval religion, — heavy, dark, and dismal, with 
ghastly pictures and the rude votive offerings of super- 
stition, alike are gone, and all that remains of either 
serves the mean use of eking out the wretched dwelling 
of an Italian beggar. 

It is a picture of all Rome, and serves well as the 
vignette of a letter which shall attempt to give some 
faint outline of a group of ruins of mingled religious 
and classic interest, which in this city of ruins fitly 
illustrates the way in which the remains of different 
ao-GS are merg^ed into and mixed with each other. 

X 30* 



354 ROME. 

It is the embarrassing and confusing feature of the 
ruins of Rome that they lie massed and piled and con- 
torted one on another, and in and with each other. 
They are the survivals of chance and accident in the 
wreck of centuries, and hold now neither topographical 
nor historical relation to each other. You cannot see 
what you want nor anything when you want, but must 
take them as they come, — -jumbled and piled and mixed, 
— Pelasgic, Etruscan, Roman, and mediseval, in one 
disastrous burial blent. There is no help for it now. 
Imperial Rome, in the splendor and solidity of her 
works, crushed out all that had gone before, forcing 
into disappearance even the massive Etruscan masonry. 
In later times degenerate emperors stole from their 
greater predecessors, taking their statues and arches 
and labelling them with their own disgraced names, 
changing the sculpture, and altering the inscriptions to 
suit. At times of civil war, too, one party, when suc- 
cessful, razed to the ground all traces of the trophies 
and power of the other. 

But the storm of destruction came in with the estab- 
lishment of the Christian religion. As this took a 
political form, it became, of course, evidence of both 
patriotic and religious fervor to destroy the temples 
and glories of the old faith, and it is a wonder that as 
much survives as does. Temples were everywhere con- 
verted into churches, and statues of the classic deities 
into those of the popes, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. 

The wanton and inexcusable destruction took place, 
however, in the Middle Ages, when popes and cardi- 
nals built great palaces out of the temples and public 
buildings of antiquity, — when the walls of the Colosseum 
itself were torn down to get the iron braces out of them, 
— -and when tombs and palaces and temples were 
robbed of fine statues by thousands, that they might be 
burned down for lime. To the intelligent mediaeval 
mind this was the most satisfactory way of obtaining 
a supply of iron and lime. Two popes at different 



PBISON OF ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER. 355 

times — seized no doubt with an attack of development 
— erected manufactories for woollen goods and saltpetre 
in the Colosseum and out of its plundered walls, and the 
history of all Kome is full of similar atrocities of van- 
dalism. 

To-day the most interesting ruins of Rome lie in the 
dirtiest quarter of the town, and are mixed up inextri- 
cably with the commonest kind of dwellings and small 
shops, stables and mean out-houses. The same piece 
of masonry may be common, or what in modern law 
we call "a party wall,^^ to a half-excavated Roman 
temple and a squalid hovel of to-day, reeking with 
filthy odors, fleas, and young beggars. Ruins, churches, 
and hovels, and sometimes inhabited palaces, lie thus 
up against each other, one bit of wall or foundation 
representing the different uses of successive centuries 
far apart. Even the streets have been pushed aside by 
the fortunes of ages, and run sometimes over, sometimes 
under, sometimes clambering around, a pile of pictur- 
esque and traditional brick and marble. AYhen you 
add to this the fact that human habitation for thou- 
sands of years has gradually raised the level of the 
surface of the earth from thirty to a hundred feet, — 
that all the Forum, for instance, once the centre of mu- 
nicipal life, is now reached only by excavation, and 
that you look down steep banks into the halls where 
Roman senators once walked and Roman orators ha- 
rangued the populace, — you have some idea of how 
utter the ruin is, and how fragmentary and piecemeal 
are even the best survivals. 

Following up the rude grate with its scriptural le- 
gend, now diverted to such thoroughly unconsecrated 
uses, I found that the house to which it served as an 
attachment gradually merged, after about a hundred 
feet of " row" tenement buildings on no particular line, 
but all closely joined together by a kind of growth 
rather than construction, into the well-known land- 
mark, the prison of St. Peter and St. Paul, where they 



356 ROME. 

are said to have suffered confinement for nine months. 
The entrance to the prison, which was a common Roman 
house-front, is on the ground, and over the prison-door 
is now a rude marble carving representing St. Peter with 
his keys and St. Paul with a sword, looking out of an 
iron grate, — something like the common bars which 
form the windows of an ordinary Pennsylvania county- 

jail. ^ 

This humble building, invested with such sacred 
interest, and which is the entrance into one of the 
ugliest dunojeons of history, horrible in the merciless 
ignorance of its construction, and frightful with a 
record of weary ages of atrocious and inhuman cruel- 
ties, has been converted, with some of the interior cells, 
into a chapel or oratory — a low-ceilinged room known 
as the church of San Pietro in Carcere. There is built 
over it and into the hillside another church — Saint 
Joseph, of the carpenters — which answers for the guild 
of that trade something of the purposes of the ancient 
" Carpenters' Hall,'' of Philadelphia. As the whole face 
of the hill is apparently one building, and the entrance 
to the prison is almost under ground, visitors frequently 
enter Saint Joseph's Church, supposing they are in San 
Pietro in Carcere. These ugly dungeons, known as 
the Mamertine prisons, although chiefly visited now 
for their religious traditions, have a historic interest 
reaching back nearly six hundred years before the time 
of Saints Peter and Paul. They — or at least the first 
cells — were built over five hundred years before Christ, 
in the kingly period, and the masonry is said to be the 
best specimen of Etruscan work of the magnitude 
extant. Here the Catiline conspirators were executed — 
Cicero coming out of the prison and announcing it in 
person to the people on the Forum, which is just ad- 
jacent. Here, for a thousand years, the savage pun- 
ishments of Pepublican and Imperial Rome were vis- 
ited on State prisoners, and the list of victims is as 
distinguished as it is sad. 



PRISON OF ST PAUL AND ST. PETER. 357 

It is the tradition, and it seems to be a reasonable 
one, that Saint Peter and Saint Paul were both confined 
here awaiting death, and that from these gloomy rooms 
were written the Second Epistle of Saint Peter: ^^ Shortly 
I must put off this my tabernacle ;'^ and also the Second 
Epistle of Saint Paul to Timothy: " The time of my 
depai'ture is at hand.'^ Saint Peter and Saint Paul 
were both distinguished leaders of a new faith, whose 
followers were bound together by especial ties. Mar- 
tyrdom was the highest honor of the church, and from 
the very first the memory and the relics of the martyrs 
were preserved with jealous fervor and handed down 
with pious care — the heirlooms of the faith. Moreover, 
during the early centuries, the management of the church 
was more honest than in later times. I had rather 
credit a tradition of the second century than a miracle 
of the fifteenth. It is in every way reasonable, I think, 
to accept this tradition, and to think and believe that 
this was the very spot of the sufferings of the great 
apostles. And knowing this, the situation becomes 
intensely dramatic, for when the expected martyrs 
entered this gloomy prison, or as they came out of it 
for trial or for death, they faced, and saw grouped 
around them, within a small centre, the Forum, the cit- 
adel of the Capitol, the imperial palace of justice, the 
great temple of Jupiter, arches, corridors of Corinthian 
columns, the temples of a galaxy of deities — all the 
splendor, glories, and power of Rome blazing around 
them, or frowning on the imperial hill close above them. 

Even to-day, from this little point of Christian inter- 
est, standing in front of an obscure chapel as plain and 
modest and unecclesiastical-looking as a prairie Meth- 
odist meeting-house, the traveller can see and study the 
historic citadel of the Capitol, bristling with the legends 
of centuries, the great Forum, the famous palace of 
the Csesars, the Colosseum, the arches of Constantine, 
Septimus Severus, and that of Titus, with the ark and 
the golden candle-sticks, — graven trophies commemo- 



358. ROME. 

rating the capture of Jerusalem, — the temple of the sun, 
the old Roman pavement of the via triumphalis that rang 
so often to the returning tread of victorious armies, wind- 
ing now like a snake in the sun by the ruined columns 
that tell of a dead faith and the open porches of the 
sleepy churches of the new, and ruins, ruins, ruins re- 
ceding through the centuries — from mediaeval to classic 
times, from classic to Etruscan, from Etruscan to pre- 
historic, — the shadowless morning of the world. 

Retracing our steps to the old grated out-house which 
served as a point cVappui for our explorations, it is found 
to be at the threshold of a dirty flight of small pebbled 
stairs, which seems to lose itself shortly in a bank of 
earth and ruined brickwork. Instead of being lost, 
however, the staircase only disappears around the base 
of a hill to appear on the other side with marble and 
sandstone steps, and turns out to be a historic flight. 
Up these steps, centuries before the birth of Christ, was 
fought many a stout battle for the possession of the 
Capitol. On this hillside had cackled the sacred geese 
of Juno, and at the head of this flight had stood the 
bold soldier Manlius when he defended the citadel. 
Here for ages had trodden senators and generals and 
high priests. To-day they were hung, not with tri- 
umphal banners, but with dirty washing suspended by 
strings from dilapidated windows and roofs. Unclean 
children, goats, and dogs played together in the sand and 
pebbles. Slovenly women sat or idly lounged at the 
doors of the hovels which clambered up the hillside 
line of the once imperial flight. 

Pushing up these steps you come on an entrance to 
the piazza of the modern Capitol, flanked on three sides 
with historic and handsome marble palaces, and filled 
with statuary familiar, and some of it dear, to the art 
world. Even the roofs around the entire square are 
lined with ranks of colossal statues of the heroes and 
great men of Rome, standing like sentinels forever. 



PRISON OF ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER. 359 

Resisting the temptation to loiter here, but going still 
further on and up the picturesque stairs, worn half into 
ruin by the use of ages, I came by a sharp turn on a 
half-hidden side entrance to one of the most strikino; 
and historically interesting of the churches of Rome, 
the Ara CoelL It was a fete day, and as I pushed aside 
the heavy leathern curtain which masked the entrance 
a stifling cloud of incense swept out into the air with 
the prayers and music. Endless wax lights from altars 
in every direction half illuminated the vast building, 
throwing moving shadows here, reflecting back there 
with a half lurid glare from the scarlet-draped columns. 
More like an English cathedral than a Roman church, 
this building was crowded with the tombs and busts and 
names of the great dead, — nobles, princes, cardinals, 
popes. Every foot of the floor of this church was 
paved with tablets, effigies, and strangely etched stones 
covering graves. These etched })ictures were mostly 
w^orn to barely traceable lines, the inscriptions almost 
obliterated, and the effigies had generally their noses, 
faces, and all salient limbs worn bare and flat by the 
feet of the worshipping multitudes who had trodden 
there for hundreds of years. 

So crowded with religious associations and incident 
is this church that the altar chapels succeed each other, 
without interval, all around the three walls, front and 
sides, and two are erected around the pillars of the nave. 
Many of the altars are the burial-places of noble fami- 
lies, their niches lined with tablets and sculptured fig- 
ures. And well might religious tradition centre and 
cluster here, for this Christian church stands on the 
ancient site of the great temple of Jupiter Capitoliuus 
— the national shrine of the old Roman State. It was 
the great j)agan temple which crowned the Capitoline 
liill — the heart of the power and glory of Rome. 
Founded six hundred years before Christ, it was several 
times destroyed and rebuilt as a pagan temple, and, 
somewhere about six hundred years after Christ, was 



360 ROME. 

finally transmuted into a Christian church — the church 
covering the site of the temple of Jupiter, Avhich was 
comparatively small, as were all the tem])les, and also, 
as some authorities say, of the great basilica, or court 
of justice of the capital, and built out of their ruins. 
To-day the twenty-two great pillars which form the 
aisles are of different sizes, shapes, materials, and archi- 
tecture, showing that they were taken from temple or 
palace just as they could be had. This great basilica 
on the Capitol hill — the basilica of the imperial palace 
— was the judgment hall where St. Paul stood his trial, 
" an ambassador in bonds," where he was condemned to 
die, and fro«iii whence he went out " ready to be offered." 
It was down the ruined steps we have ascended that he 
descended into the dungeon at the bottom of the hill, 
which was the vestibule to martyrdom. The Christian 
traditions and interest of the spot date, therefore, far 
back of its formal consecration to Christian worship. 

This church of the Ara Cwli, dim and dingy in the 
fast-fading splendor of centuries, has been the site of 
human worship for twenty-five hundred years of re- 
corded history. Its history lias been the history of 
religious faith and progress in Rome all that time. 
The stones in its walls have seen sacrifices smoking and 
heard prayers ascend to Jupiter for victory. In sight 
of it in the long centuries a great arch was erected to Isis, 
and crumbled away. Near by it a temple arose to the 
sun, and in the course of years was buried under a new 
city. Almost on its threshold the imperial decrees of 
Constantine, establishing the civil rights of Christianity, 
must have been published. To-day it is the home and 
sacred shrine of the miraculous image of the Bambino, 
which devout Romans gather in multitudes to adore. 

The door by which I entered the Ara Coell was a side 
entrance. From the front there sweeps down another 
immense flight of steps, each step a venerable base of 
worn gray stone. When the Ara Coeli was tlie temple 
of Jupiter it was up this way that Julius Csesar climbed 



PRISON OF ST. PAUL AND ST. PETER. 3gl 

Oil his knees to return thanks at the great altar, smok- 
ing with grateful sacrifices, for his Gallic victories. So 
even the devotion of the Scala Santa has a pagan pre- 
cedent. 

It was in this church — the very heart of the history 
of Rome, listening to the lazy chanting of vespers — that 
Gibbon, as he himself tells us, conceived the idea of 
writing the "Decline and Fall." 

The church has a further world-wide interest as 
being, with the convent attached, the ecclesiastical head- 
quarters of the Order of Franciscans, the barefooted 
friars, followers of St. Francis of Assisium. The gen- 
eral of the order resides in this convent, and the great 
sunny steps leading into the front entrance to the church 
are generally covered over with unwashed, brown- 
gowned friars, with their bare heads and rope girdles, 
and still dirtier beggars picking up pennies from tour- 
ists and fleas from each other. In Italy this is called 
poetic and picturesque ; in our land it would simply be 
called filthy, and the crowd driven off by a policeman. 

In virtue of the civic as well as religious interest of 
this site and its traditions the church of the A7'a Coeli 
is the municipal church of Rome, and over its doors, 
along with an image of the Virgin Mary, is blazoned 
the familiar monogram S. P. Q. R. It is still the 
altar — be the cultus Christian or pagan — of the God of 
the Capitol. 

EOME, 



31 



362 ROME. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

THE PALACE OF THE INQUISITION. 

The Gloomy Palace of the Holy Office — A Deaf Stone 
Grave in the Heart of a Moving City — An Inhuman 
Construction — The Inquisition as it Exists To-day— 
A Prisoner of the Inquisition of the Nineteenth 
Century. 

Just behind that noble grove of pillars which forms 
the wonderful portico of St. Peter's and to the right as 
you leave the church, but masked by some common, 
irregular structures, there arises a gloomy and forbid- 
ding pile of massive masonry known to Rome as the 
'^ Palace of the Holy Office." This sacred or sacrile- 
gious euphemism conceals a celebrated building which 
is looked for with much interest by American visitors, 
and regarded with singular emotion and profound 
thankfulness that it too now belongs to Rome of the 
past — the Rome of Caligula and Nero and the Borgias. 
For reasons readily understood it does not figure very 
conspicuously in the guide-books. 

This . accursed building, in which they killed the 
body, and sometimes the soul, is an immense structure 
of solid stone- work, nearly four hundred feet in front. 
It is almost rectangular in shape, the front being the 
long side, and is a little over fifty feet in height. The 
outer walls are many feet in thickness, and in places 
buttressed. There are almost no windows in the entire 
building. The immense wall of the north end is one 
unrelieved blank, unbroken by an opening of any kind. 
The entire north wing has but three small windows, 
all of them thirty-six feet above the ground, equal to 
the fourth story of an average Philadelphia house. In 



THE PALACE OF THE INQUISITION. 363 

the main building there are a few windows, grated with 
immense iron bars. In the south wing there are no 
windows excepting at the height of the three in the 
northern w^ing, although there are imitation windows 
on a lower floor, so well constructed and painted as to 
deceive one at first into the belief that they were real. 
Built into the back is the rear of a large church, which 
effectually closes up that side. 

For all ingress or exit to this immense and terrible 
building there is but one visible door, and it gave me 
a sensation of pleasure to see standing on guard before 
it, with bayonet fixed, a bright-eyed, red-cheeked 
young soldier of the army of Italy. The people have 
confiscated this palace of atrocities, and it is now used 
as a military station and barracks. 

In the Revolution of 1848 the gates of this merci- 
less structure, at once judgment-hall and prison, were 
opened and the prisoners set free. I marvel greatly 
that it was not then razed to the ground, for it was a 
more infamous building than the Bastile, and more 
justly the object of wrath and vengeance, inasmuch as 
it had been blasphemously conducted in the name of 
God. In 1849 the Inquisition, as an institution, was 
formally abolished by the Roman Assembly during its 
brief tenure of power, but was re-established by Pius 
IX. the same year when he regained his authority. 

Victor Emmanuel, when he was made king, again 
cleared out the building, and it may be a matter of 
some interest to know that military possession was 
taken of it by the present king, then a lieutenant-gen- 
eral in his father's army. The Inquisition still sur- 
vives, however, as an institution and court of the 
Roman Church under Pope Leo XIII. The organiza- 
tion is that established in the sixteentli century, — a body 
of twelve cardinals with the Pope officially at its head, 
— and its secret sessions are now held in the Vatican. 
Its legal title is Sacra Congregatio Romance et Univer- 
salis Inquisitionis, — The Holy Congregation for the 



364 ROME. 

Inquisition of Rome and the whole Church. Its power, 
liowever, is greatly limited and confined by the civil 
law, and it dares no more arrest a Roman citizen. It 
has full power, however, I believe, over the bishops and 
priests of the Roman Catholic Church, and probably 
over the entire population of the Vatican enclosure — 
that curious little ecclesiastical imperium in a civil 
imperio — which is too much. I suppose an American 
])riest or bishop could be imprisoned here if he chose to 
come over and put his head in the tiger^s mouth. 

While the lowering Palace of the Holy Office, with 
its deaf stone ears and voiceless walls, is the representa- 
tive monument of the Inquisition, designed and specially 
built for its dreadful uses, it has not been the scene of 
some of its historic crimes most familiarly known to 
the civilized world. Galileo did not make within its 
walls his famous recantation of the movement of the 
earth. That shameful triumph of brutal ignorance 
took place in the convent of the Church of Santa Maria 
Sopra Minerva, long used as the tribunal and dungeon 
of the Inquisition. Bruno, for teaching the heresy of 
the Copernican system, was not burnt in its court, but 
in the Campo de Fiori, a kind of Roman Smithfield, 
across the river, where the barbarous autos-da-fe of 
that time were customarily held. It is now a dirty 
market-place, wide and open, filled with foul smells 
and petty traffic. Savanarola was burnt at Floreiice. 

But although this palace, only erected about 1600, 
has been spared some of the dramatic horrors of the 
history of the Inquisition, it is the building which 
must ever be associated in the public mind with this 
institution and bear its odium,. — an odium that will 
grow stronger and deeper as men grow gentler and 
juster and more Christian. It was the official head- 
quarters of the Inquisition, the seat of the unjust judge, 
the chamber of torture and of death, — built deliberately 
and in cold blood for the worst purposes of the insti- 
tution, when it was at the height of its power and 



THE PALACE OF THE INQUISITION. 355 

cruelty. I do not propose in this place to enter into 
any argument as to the nature or character of the secret 
trials of the Inquisition. I am only describing the 
character and appearance of the building prepared for 
its operations, — a building constructed so that human 
eye cannot see nor ear hear what is going on within it, 
and which is stronger than a castle. In this building 
the most appalling tortures, the most atrocious murders 
might be carried on within twenty feet of a passer-by 
on the street of a crowded city. It is a building whose 
plan and construction is unholy — a building literally 
conceived in sin and born in iniquity, and which has 
no right to exist. 

So much for the outside and the story which it tells. 
I will let Mr. A. J. C Hare, a writer whose exhaust- 
ive studies on Rome are known the world over, tell in 
a few brief lines the story of the inside : 

'^ In the interior of the building is a lofty hall with 
gloomy frescos of Dominican saints, and many terri- 
ble dungeons and cells, in which the visitor is unable 
to stand upright, having their vaulted ceilings lined 
with reeds to deaden sound. When the people rushed 
into the Inquisition at the Revolution, a number of 
human bones were found in these vaults, which so 
excited the popular fury that an attack on the Domin- 
ican Convent at the Minerva was anticipated." 

While these things add to the dramatic horrors of 
the place, they do not essentially increase its wrong. 
To the AnQ;:lo-Saxon mind secret trial is a wrono- which 
cannot be very well made worse. It is unfair ; it is a 
harm to the State as well as to the prisoner. It is in 
itself a violation of law and a prostitution of justice, 
and a fit ground for violent revolution. And it is just 
because this belief is grounded in us we have no bas- 
tiles and no inquisitions. And I think the same good 
day is coming for the Romans. It is customary to 
charge the outrages, moral and ])hysical, of the Inqui- 
sition on the alleo^ed crueltv of the Italian nature.. As 

31* 



366 ROME. 

the Italian people have, hovA^ever, within thirty years 
three times driven out the institution, it can hardly 
with fairness be laid to their doors. 

It is said also in its defence that its terrible and in- 
human punishments were medieeval, and to be charged 
to the spirit of the age, and that they could not be re- 
peated now under any circumstances. This is simply 
not the case. The claws of the ecclesiastical tiger of 
Rome are cut and his fangs muzzled, but claws and 
teeth are both there yet. I suppose it perhaps would 
not do to burn an offender in 1880 in the piazza of 
St. Peter's for not thinking as you wanted him to, but 
I have seen a man, yet comparatively young, who, a 
few years ago, when Pope Pius IX. — who was claimed 
to have been a gentle ruler — was in power, was arrested 
without warning, hearing, or being allowed bail, con- 
fined in the Inquisition, tried secretly, and sentenced 
to a punishment of diabolic ingenuity and cruelty. He 
was chained to the bottom of a flat-boat in the river 
without a cover day or night, exposed to the glare of 
the sun and the deadly damps of the night air. When 
you understand that the Italian never walks in the sun 
for fear of it, but seeks even the morning shade of the 
street, never sleeps with an open window for dread of 
the malarial air from the Campagna, you see the 
fiendish intent of this punishment. And most of the 
squad in this boat did die, as they were meant to, — 
burned to death by the sun instead of the fagot, by 
slow torture instead of quick torture. 

The dismantled palace of the Inquisition is one of 
the features of the Rome that has gone. It is one of the 
few monuments that the world would not willingly 
see restored. It has passed into the dust of history 
only within living memory, but its sinister walls are 
already as admonitory a theatre for republican musing 
as the debris of the Forum or the vanished altars of 
the Pantheon. 

EOME. 



CONSTANTINE'S BATTLE-FIELD. 3^7 



CHAPTER XL. 

CONSTANTINE^S BATTLE-FIELD. 

In Hoc Signo — The Liliputian Face of the Imperial 
City — The Forum Komanum — Ruins, Ruins, Ruins — The 
Marble People — On the Yia Trtomphale — The Red 
Cross in the Sky. 

This morning, while out in the saddle for exercise, I 
rode over the battle-field which, sixteen hundred years 
ago, decided the fate of Rome and the course of the 
worhFs history — that decisive field overAvhich hung in 
the sky the great red cross, and in hoc signo led Con- 
stantine into imperial power and made Christianity the 
religion of the State. To-day a body of Bersaglieri — 
Italian zouaves — were being exercised in skirmish drill 
on its skirts, peacefully playing at arms wliere the for- 
tunes of the world had been staked and won. It is so 
everywhere here — the tamer uses of the present stand 
out in sharp contrast with the heroic memories of the 
past, which seem to reprove and shame them. This 
great battle was fought in the peaceful fields but a few 
miles from the walls, and its nearness to the city serves 
as a measure of difference in strategic movements brought 
about by the use of firearms and long-range weajions. 
To-day this field — the centre of the contest in olden 
times — would be but the outer line of the city defences. 
Crossing the Tiber on my way into Rome, I passed in by 
the only bridge across the north of the town — the mod- 
est little Ponte Molle flowing over the very spot where 
Constantine threw into the river the dead body of his 
defeated rival, Maxentius. It was in this battle and at 
this crossing was lost the seven-branched golden candle- 
stick brought from the temple of Jerusalem by Titus. 



368 J^OME. 

It was at this little bridge, too, that the returning envoys 
of the Allobrogi were arrested and the guilty letters 
of the Catiline conspirators found on them — the letters 
that cost Catiline his head and brought triumph and 
political success and honors to Cicero. Attempting to 
cross this bridge, too. General Oudinot, a few years ago, 
met with a severe repulse, and the yellow waters were 
crimsoned with French blood. It is thus that every 
inch of ground here has its successive strata of historic 
associations, and one cannot help feeling, even on a 
pleasure party or when employed in the pettiest pur- 
poses of every-day life, that he is walking among the 
tombs and monuments of the great. Not a spot here 
but has been the scene of heroic struggle and achieve- 
ment and sacrifice. 

Perhaps it is this very greatness of its memories, 
stretching back through time in endless vistas, which 
so dwarfs the impressions of modern Rome and makes 
everything look and feel so small and little. You look 
for a Roman senator — you see a dirty friar. Of course, 
as regards physical impressions, the American eye, from 
the grandeur of our continent, its mighty mountains, 
great lakes, and noble rivers, is set on a large scale and 
must be readjusted to Europe, where nature has been 
less generous and has graven the face of the earth in 
miniature. The seven hills of Rome which rise so 
grandly on our school-books and boyish imaginations, 
are really inconsiderable swellings of the surface of the 
ground. A night or two after my arrival I attended a 
dinner-party at Minister Marsh's, and left without the 
least idea that I had been on the Esquiline hill, and 
that we had been drinking champagne in the classic 
precincts where of old Antony, and Virgil, and Horace, 
and Macsenas had been content with the more modest 
brands of Falernus, and thought them good enough to 
send down to posterity in history and verse. It would 
certainly be dangerous to fall from the Tarpeian rock 
to-day, but there is nothing appalling in the baby cliff 



CONSTANTINE'S BATTLE-FIELD. 369 

to an American eye. I have a friend in Colorado 
who has in his private grounds a much more imposing 
precipice. The magnificent artificial lakes, too, of clas- 
sic fame must have been, many of them, mere basins, 
or perhaps fountains. The old Roman highways, the 
first military roads of history, are entirely too narrow 
for the march of a modern army with any safety. 
Even the great citadel of the capitol — the Capitoliue 
hill of legend and tradition, still crested with palaces 
and stately with statued flights of stairways — is yet a 
very modest elevation. The Pantheon is but a small 
church, as indeed were all the Roman temples, the ser- 
vice being sacrificial and conducted by the priests alone, 
or, at most, sometimes in the presence of a few distin- 
guished personages of state. The Tiber, which gleams 
like a golden thread through all the poets, is a dirty, 
muddy, unpicturesque stream of inconsiderable width, 
but of some military consequence by reason of its depth 
and slippery banks. The Corso, with all the glamour 
which the carnival has thrown about it, although now 
the leading street of Rome, as in the days of imperial 
glory, when it was the via lata, or Broadway, of the 
capital, is quite narrow and unimposing, its shops 
meagre, its sidewalks wretched — one of those places 
that, if in Philadelphia, would be thrown up as a 
reproach to Councils, and adduced as an instance of the 
inefficiency of Republican administration in cities. 

The Forum, that magnificent theatre which shines so 
splendidly in imagination, is a space of very moderate 
dimensions as seen on the ground. It hardly seems 
adequate at all to the purposes with Avhich history cred- 
its it. It is a lengthy quadrilateral area, narrowing 
from one base to the other. The extreme landmarks, 
from the standing arch of Severus to the ruined arch 
of Fabius, are perfectly well known. This space in- 
cludes the comitiam, an open place for holding mass 
meetings, and the forum proper. Its dimensions, as 
given by Bunsen, are but six hundred feet in length by 
y 



370 ROME. 

an average breadth of say one hundred and fifty feet. 
And this area, although probably entirely flagged with 
stone or marble pavement, was not an unobstructed 
space, but was studded with public monuments, altars, 
columns, tombs, statuary, besides the several rostra, the 
corridors of pillars under whose shades the orators and 
clients walked, and the legion of statues of the great 
generals. It is not as large as the central Penn Square 
in Philadelphia, in which stands a single solid building 
whose foundations are four hundred and fifty feet 
square. Yet Penn Square looks of modest size to an eye 
adjusted to the American range. And how the Forum 
dwindles, too, when contrasted with that magnificent 
sweep in Paris embracing the gardens of the Tuileries 
and the Place de la Concorde. Much of the splendor 
of the Forum Romanum undoubtedly came from the 
grand buildings which lined its limits, the shining tem- 
ples, the imposing basilicas, the triumphal arches, and 
the overhanging glories of the Capitol hill ; but allow- 
ing for all this, it could have never have compared with 
the grandeur of modern civic magnificence. 

To be sure, it must be borne in mind that the attri- 
tion of ages has worn down the hills, and that the con- 
tinuous wreck of centuries has levelled up the surface 
of the ground ; but still, the history of Pome is so far 
greater than its physical features that the first sight of 
them generally disappoints the traveller. The altar of 
the world is a small one. 

Again, the general impression of Rome which one 
gets from the street is one of commercial pettiness. 
Everything exposed for sale is in small quantities. The 
shops are petty, and meagre almost to poverty. There 
is no advertising, no display, nothing of any kind to 
indicate that business is being carried on on a broad or 
generous scale, or with any amount either of capital or 
stock of goods. With the exceiDtion of a few of the 
leading stores, the shops are such as one sees in Phila- 
delphia and New York in the poorer streets. The 



CONSTANTINE'S BATTLE-FIELD. 37I 

wholesale feature of trade is entirely absent. Men 
work for small ends in a small way. 

In fact, Italy, as well as all Continental Europe, lives 
by small economies. 

It is the lesson which we must learn in America, and 
have been learning latterly by severe experience ; and 
it is wonderful how much it means for the poor man or 
person of moderate means. These j^eople here abso- 
lutely live on what we throw away. For instance, beef 
here, wholesale — a dressed beef or a quarter of it — is 
more costly than in Philadelphia or New York ; but 
the steak raw, from the small butcher- shop, or cooked, 
from the restaurant, costs less than with us. The saving 
is in the division, in the consumption of every portion, 
and in the absence or strict limitation of the profits of 
middlemen. Everything is counted to the centime (the 
one-fifth part of our cent), in which figure all petty 
amounts are kept. 

The benefit of this severe economy to the whole 
comnuinity is seen in the large number of Americans 
and English people of moderate means who come here 
to live. While residence here temporarily, or for those 
whose tastes or calling compel them to associate with 
people of distinction or influence, is as expensive as in 
most other places, those who come to reside perma- 
nently, and to live quietly and rather obscurely, can do 
so with great comfort on incomes which would not 
support bare life in America. The things which are 
lavish here are the luxuries of culture. 

There is a profusion of art and ruins, which cannot 
be described. The heavens seem to have rained down 
sculpture and statuary on the favored city. There are 
statues of the great dead of history and tradition, of 
Christian and pagan, and legendary fame, by thousands 
and thousands. Whole galleries and corridors are lined 
with them. Parks and public grounds and fountains 
and squares and courts are thronged with a marble 
population, while the hundreds of churches are all 



372 _ ROME. 

stately and imposing, with a wealth of stone effigies, 
angels and archangels, warriors, popes, cardinals, and 
princes. Out the Appian Way mutilated statues, like 
voiceless sentries, stand guard over the unknown dead 
of unknown lands for miles. You cannot dig the 
foundations of the commonest house but you come on 
ruins, and these ruins may be rare and costly marbles. 
In fact, there are people here who "prospect" the soil 
for antiques and marbles, just as in Nevada or Cali- 
fornia they prospect for gold mines. Statuary, a single 
piece of which in our land would be the central feature 
of a millionaire's residence, is here found in the most 
out-of-the-way places, and consigned to the commonest 
uses. In the house where I lodge, for instance, — not a 
palace now or ever, but the dwelling of a citizen of the 
middle class, — the landings on the stone stairways are 
adorned with old Roman tombs; and all the time, in 
some new niche or corner, I come on a burial-urn, an 
inscription, or piece of sculpture; while over the inner 
court of the garden a bust of Domitian frowns all day, 
and looks miserable when it rains. 

According to an official Roman record preserved, 
there were, A. d. 540, in Rome 22 great equestrian 
statues in bronze, of which only one remains to-day, 
66 ivory statues of the gods, 80 gilt statues of the gods, 
of which only one remains, and no less than 3785 
statues of emperors and generals in bronze. Now, of 
'these nearly 4000 great bronzes only the very slightest 
number have survived, while we have thousands of 
marble statues which apparently were too common to 
be enumerated. What must have been the marble 
wealth of Rome, distributed in her 17,097 palaces and 
13,052 fountains and 39 theatres and 9000 baths of 
that date, and in her numberless temples and wealthy 
private houses ! It was a marble population as great 
as that of many a busy and ambitious American city 
of our day, — say Hartford, or Nashville, or Omaha, or 
Denver. AndJ^his classic population was not confined 



CONSTANTINE'S BATTLE-FIELD. 373 

to imperial Rome, but was spread over all Italy, even 
to such purely commercial points as the shipping-port 
of Ostia. This was the legacy which pagan civilization 
left to the keeping of the mediaeval Church. 

It is a curious fact, too, that while thousands of dol- 
lars are spent annually in the restoration of classic 
ruins, the ruin of to-day goes steadily on. Churches 
are frequently falling into decay. Old arches and gate- 
ways and walls that, a few centuries ago, defended 
their owner's landed premises, are now peacefully fall- 
ing down around farm-fields, mortified, perhaps, in 
their decayed gentility at their lowered fortunes. 
Even the faith of the hour cannot preserve its shrines. 
Riding, the other day, out the Via Triomphale, only 
five or six miles from the city, and on the open high- 
way, I came on an abandoned roadside altar that, within 
only a few years, had been one of some pretensions. 
The bent cross had fallen from the top of the arched 
niche, the lamp — its light gone out for ever — lay un- 
tended and untouched, the once brilliant frescos, de- 
picting in life-size figures the Crucifixion, were being 
washed out by the rain. The glass and iron which 
had protected the shrine were bent and broken. There 
was no sacrilegious hand to mutilate or deface the con- 
secrated spot, but there was none to tend or protect. 
The service was over, the worshippers were gone ; the 
faith of old had fled, and all this with a church almost 
in sight and the fallen shrine itself built into the high 
walls of a pile of substantial farm-buildings. I reined 
up my horse, to look and think, before a Christian altar, 
forgotten, as desolate, and silent, and abandoned of 
human heart and prayer, as if it had been in Thebes 
or Carthage, and all in sight of St. Peter's great dome. 

Yes, in Rom^tself, on this spot which has seen the 
dissolution of the greatest systems of human thought 
and human power, ruin is at this l),our the law and 
order of the day. The Church, its hold on the confi- 
dence and trust of the people gone, is even now but a 

32 



374 ROME. 

historic " survival/' a picture slowly dissolving in the 
approaching rays of some new dispensation, and the 
civil government of Italy, in common with those of all 
Europe, visibly trembles under the volcanic rumblings 
of Red Eepublicanism. The red cross of Constantine 
is in the sky again. 

KOME. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

OSTIA. 

A Buried City — The Lost Shipping-Port of the Ancient 
World — Campo Morto — In the Waste of the Maremna 
— Ancient Roman Civilization — An Italian Pompeii — In 
the Wilderness and Desert on the Confines of Rome — 
Mediaeval Ostia — The Saracen in Italy. 

This week, in company with a New England author 
held in honor in Europe no less than his own country, 
I drove down to the buried seaport of Ostia, at the 
mouth of the Tiber, to spend a day among its ruins. 
It w^as our purpose to visit this locality at our leisure, 
and, by a somewhat careful examination of the ground 
in person, establish clearly to our own minds the out- 
lines and lost physical features of what was once the 
first commercial metropolis of the world, and that, too, 
at that splendid time when its imperial dominion cen- 
tered in Rome. 

This lost and ancient city, now seated in the heart of 
pestilential swamps, and apart from any line of civil- 
ized travel, is rarely visited, although it has been the 
theatre of much critical study, and vast sums of 
money have been spent on it, from time to time, in 
intelligent archaeological explorations. It is, however, 
a most interesting spot, and eloquent with the lessons 
of history. In 'fact, its mute ruins give a vividness 
and color to our conception of the busy life and ac- 



OSTIA. 375 

tivities of imperial Rome which you do not get in Rome 
itself. 

Ostia was the seaport of Rome, the Tiber at Rome 
itself furnishing no facilities for extensive wharfage 
or the reception of vessels of large draught. At the 
flush period of the Roman power it was the Liverpool 
of the world. It was greater than Liverpool, for it 
was the shipping city of the world at a time when 
there were no railways or telegraphs. It was, for 
manv centuries, the point from which the great Roman 
expeditions to conquer, one after another, the countries 
of the known world debarked. From here Scipio 
Africanus sailed with his fleet for Spain, and Claudius 
for Britain, and by this shore long, long before, apneas 
had sailed up the "yellow" tide. From here for hun- 
dreds of years set out the fleets of many oared merchant- 
men for Carthage and Corinth and Tyre and Sidon. 

To-day this city, once throbbing with the commerce 
of the world, and floating its triumphant navies, is 
absolutely abandoned, desolate, and silent. Human 
life has left it. The degenerate Rome of to-day hardly 
knows where it is, forgetting it, with its hundreds of 
other forgotten glories, and even the Tiber has changed 
its banks and deserted it. It lies under ground and 
under water in the centre of a deadly waste. This 
mal-aria is known, in the picturesque tongue of Italy, 
as the Campo Morto ; so fatal is its breath that it 
is popularly believed to be death for a traveller to 
spend a night at Ostia. And, even before the shades 
of night fall, the passing stranger shudders — with good 
reason — as he sees spectral arms of pale mist stretch- 
ing out from the marsh to clasp him in their deadly 
embrace. These fever-swamps that engulf the long- 
doomed town stretch into dense forests of stone-pine, 
mingled with thick underbrush and thickets, through 
which roam buffalo and wild boar. And all this within 
twenty miles of the gates of Rome ! 

That an absolute wilderness should exist within a 



376 ROME. 

few miles of a great city like this is something almost 
incredible to an American mind. Yet so it is. There 
being no public conveyance in this direction, we hired 
a private wagon and driver, and set out under our own 
leadership and guidance. The driver had never been 
to Ostia, and did not know where it was, and we ex- 
plored our way through guide-books and maps. The 
road was sufficiently bad; at times, however, the sur- 
face of the old Roman " way" came to the ground, its 
massive, irregular stone blocks giving us, at any rate, 
a substantial foundation. 

Leaving Rome, for about two miles we had a pleasant 
entourage of farms and fields. This, I believe, is a 
rather modern reclamation, the whole interval between 
Rome and Ostia having been for centuries a desert. 
These few farms, however, seemed to feel themselves 
on the frontier of life and near the confines of the land 
of death. There was a stillness and want of motion 
that seemed lethargic, and almost oppressed you, even 
passing through it. There were a few closed chapels 
and some abandoned wayside altars falling to ruins. 
Every haystack was surmounted with a cross, as if 
appealing to heaven. At about the extreme limits of 
cultivation there is a monastery, which, however, the 
monks desert in the summer, fleeing lor their lives. 
In the winter they inhabit their possessions with com- 
parative safety, tending some good vineyards, and, I 
suppose, the chapels of the vicinage. Under the 
stimulus of modern science they have recently under- 
taken the cultivation of the eucalyptus tree, which they 
raise in groves, and from which they manufacture a 
liquor which is claimed to be a useful preventive 
against the malaria and fevers. 

Very soon this meagre life died away, and we were 
in a desert, with the domes and campaniles of Rome in 
sight. From here to Ostia we rode through a dreary 
waste — dismal, silent, and barren of cultivation. The 
soil is good enough if reclaimed from the malarial 



OSTIA. 377 

swamps, but man lias given it up. The swamps, wliich, 
even in the time of Troy, were known as unhealtliy, 
had been abandoned in modern times entirely, and had 
become a refuge for criminals and convicts. Here and 
there a straw hut, not any better than our Indian 
wigwam, attested the solitary presence of some outcast 
or waif-life, but even these were few and far apart. 
Within very recent years — since the government has 
undertaken the work of systematic exploration at Ostia 
— this kind of thing has been broken up, and travel is 
safe enough, although there has been one known case 
of brigandage this spring. 

The sharp contrast comes when one remembers that 
centuries and centuries ago this desolated waste over 
which we rode was smiling with villas, the homes of 
opulence and cultivation. History tells us that there 
was once a time when Ostia, with its eighty thousand 
of inhabitants, was an actual suburb of Rome, the 
distance between the two being an unbroken line of 
country houses and residences, built on a scale of 
luxury and magnificence which has never been equalled 
anywhere or at any time else in the world. The 
classic writers speak of the "great mountains of white 
marble" seen far out on the sea which guarded this 
avenue of nations to the imperial city. 

The Ostia which students go to see and savants to 
explore to-day is a town of twofold corporeal shape — 
old Ostia and new Ostia. Both are gone, and are to 
be seen only in their ruins. The one is a wreck of 
Roman greatness, pagan and imperial ; the other, of 
^oman power, mediaeval and Christian. 

It is of old Ostia that I have been speaking so far, 
which to-day is simply a rough surface of field, broken 
by tumuli and ridges. Cropping out of this surface at 
odd intervals you see broken bits and masses of massive 
brick masonry, the surviving remnants of arches and 
temples and forums and tombs. In the sheltered 
niche of a storm-beaten and crumbling brick arcliway 

82* 



378 ROME. 

over the imposing gate of the city Ave fell suddenly 
upon a half- wild bitch, of Campagna breed, with a 
litter of pups — the only resident of the once-powerful 
city. She looked as much startled as we were, but, 
after a growl or two, settled down to friendship, and 
was perhaps glad of an incident to break the unevent- 
ful monotony of the wilderness. 

Excavations at Ostia have been made during recent 
years on a large scale and in an intelligent and judicious 
manner. They are of peculiar historic value, as, the 
story of the city being so well known, they cannot be 
used to support theories or vague conjectures, but 
become illustrative evidence of fixed history. Ostia 
was also a purely Roman city. Its remains are the 
remains of a purely Roman civilization, unembarrassed 
by any Etruscan or Grecian admixture, and they reveal 
in vivid form a perfect picture of the daily life of ancient 
Roman society. Excavations have been made which 
develop not only temples and baths and public build- 
ings and detached walls, but long lines of streets enter- 
ing into each other, and in one district running down 
to the once-busy wharves. You can walk on the streets 
in which these people walked, and enter the houses in 
which they lived, see the frescos on the walls which 
their eyes enjoyed, and go up the stairs by which they 
ascended to the upper floors of their dwellings. You 
see the ruts of their chariot wheels in the Roman pave- 
ment of the streets. Going down to the wharf, you 
find their commission-houses and shipping-offices. All 
around you, in vast quantities, lie fragments of pottery 
— the remains of the vessels and utensils they used. 
This pottery is generally coarser and embellished with 
less ornamentation than that found in the ruined Aztec 
cities of New Mexico and Arizona. You may tread 
the forum where they met for business and exchange ; 
the temple where they gathered for worship — too bare, 
however, of altar or image to know whom they wor- 
shipped ; the baths, the great luxury of Roman life ; the 






OSTIA. 



379 



theatre where they sat for pleasure and relaxation. You 
may go farther back up the hill, and meditate for half 
a mile among the tombs where they buried their dead. 

Of course, but a small portion of the vast city is 
excavated, but enough is laid bare to give one a full 
idea of its daily walk and manner of life. The streets 
run in the same curving, irregular lines as those of 
Rome to-day, and are equally narrow. The ceilings 
are high, just as in the palaces of Rome to-day — the 
same climatic conditions producing the same results. 
The warmer and more delightful the climate the higher 
the ceiling everywhere, and the colder and moister the 
climate the lower the ceiling, as in Holland, England, 
and other northern countries. 

The colors of the frescos here are as bright as at 
Pompeii ; the rooms higher, and the stairways quite a 
marked feature, the Greek traditions which conditioned 
the architecture of Pompeii not conducing to high 
buildings. 

Although a shipping-port and known only for its 
commercial traditions, Ostia was the home of great 
culture and taste, and her citizens must have been 
largely people of cultivation and refinement. Some of 
the finest treasures of antique statuary have been ex- 
humed from these rooms, — exquisite works of art that 
the average well-to-do citizen of Liverpool or an Ameri- 
can manufacturing town would hardly appreciate. In 
fact, the Vatican is full of them, a gr^at portion of the 
excavations having been done under Pius V. And 
not only statuary, but tombs of masterly designs, sar- 
cophagi, carvings, mosaics, etc. Noted among these 
rescued treasures are the familiar bust of the young 
Augustus, the Ganymede of Phsedimus, and bas- 
reliefs of Endymion and Diana. In fact, the reve- 
lations of Ostia are conclusive evidence of the very 
great culture of the Roman people as a whole. This 
city was but an ordinary business-town, not pretending 
to any literature or art reputation, but its treasures are 



380 ROME. 

rare in quality and wonderful in number. The Ostian 
merchant of eighteen hundred years ago would have 
looked with curious contempt on the American million- 
aire of to-day furnishing liis house with chromos or 
auction-room paintings, or engravings bought on the 
recommendation of a salesman. All this is the more 
wonderful when we remember that the cost of works of 
art was about equal to what it is now. A fairly good 
statue of full life-size cost $150, while a work of Phidias 
or Praxiteles brought $10,000 to $30,000. But to 
understand these values we must recollect that a slave 
could be kept for about ten cents a day, and that beef 
could be bought in the markets for four cents a pound. 
It is a humiliating contrast between classic and mod- 
ern civilization, that for hundreds of years the rude 
lime-kilns in the woods around Ostia have been sup- 
plied with sculptures from the ruins to make lime for 
Eoman peasants, and Roman princes and cardinals, too, 
at times, I suspect. 

^ The approach to Ostia to-day is a very pathetic remi- 
niscence of past cultivation and grandeur. You cross 
the fatal Maremna, which here sinks into a water v^ 
marsh to-day, but in past times may have been flooded 
with the healthy waves of the sea, by a solid causeway 
of hard Roman pavement, built on piles and protected 
on each side by a low wall or railing of stone and 
marble. All along this causeway of over a mile in 
length, abandoned for centuries, half hidden by the 
reeds and thistles or half sunken in the poisonous marsh, 
stand on either side forgotten ranks of marble statues, 
— vanished gods, limbless heroes, headless queens and 
ladies, worn and time-stained senators. Some are 
fallen, some are leaning, all are forsaken. And this 
imperial approach, impressive even in its abandonment, 
leads up to a wretched . Roman trattoria, the refuge of 
outcasts and petty brigands. 

One of the marked features of the walls of Ostia, 
both interior and outside, is the variety of pleasing 



OSTIA. 381 

effects worked out by the simple use of brick, both in 
form and color — the very same effects within late years 
so largely introduced into the United States. 

Ostia is lovingly remembered in Cliristian tradition 
as the home of St. Augustine, and the place where he 
parted with his mother, Monica, to bear the gospel to 
Saxon England. 

Being the harbor and port of Rome, Ostia bore the 
brunt of all attacks made by sea, and her traditions are 
largely those of warfare and the repulse of pirates. 
At last, in the fifth century, she was utterly destroyed 
by the Saracens and razed to the ground. So utter was 
the ruin that no attempt was ever made to rebuild the 
town ; but three hundred years later another town was 
laid out about a mile away from the river and became 
a place of importance and interest. This was mediaeval 
Ostia, known to-day as "the new town." Here began 
again the fighting with the pirates, and the old Middle 
Age fortifications yet extant tell the story very graphi- 
cally. That stalwart, fighting Pope, Julius IL, when 
a cardinal, built here a castle so massive and secure that 
it yet stands in all its original strength, and is one of 
the best illustrations of mediaeval military life which 
has come down to us. This compact little fortress is 
a capacious round-tower — a perfect circle— surrounded 
by bastions, which are linked with a curtain, and the 
whole encompassed by a wide and deep ditch. It is ex- 
tremely picturesque, and, as it stands on level ground, 
was capable of indefinite defence in a time when it could 
only be taken by land. Nevertheless, the besieged were 
safe only by sleepless vigilance. Half an hour's care- 
lessness would have let in the enemy. 

For hundreds of years these castles and towers of 
Ostia — for there were others of them — maintained this 
fluctuating and eventful warfare with Cilician pirates 
and Saracenic armies ; but at last, in the utter exhaust- 
ion which marked the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
here, its life flamed away, and they, too, lay down in 



382 ROME. 

ruin and weariness. We picked our way through a 
marshy and treacherous plain that once was bright and 
brilliant with the tents of the Saracen ; under decadent 
forests that not many hundred years ago had heard the 
evening prayers of the Moslem. To-day an exhausted 
Roman workman or two scraping gently on the edges 
of an endless mass of ruin, a frightened wild animal, a 
wretched peasant, the child, perhaps, of a convict, and 
born in a land of death, were all there was to break the 
melancholy solitude. Yet, after all, how much better 
than that the Turk should have succeeded in fixing a 
European camp here as well as on the Black Sea ! 

It is almost impossible for an American mind to con- 
ceive that here, within twenty miles of Rome, the altar 
of the learning and culture of the world, there is a wil- 
derness as silent, as savage, as desolate, as on the empty 
plains or our untrodden frontier, where buffalo and wild 
game range undisturbed ; a sanctuary for criminals — if 
there were anything to tempt crime or plunder; a soli- 
tude that seems abandoned of man and of God. And 
it is a solitude, too, oppressive and stifling and appall- 
ing — for it is the silence of death and the grave, and 
not like the fresh solitudes of our Western prairies, the 
stillness of the morning. 

Yet listen to Pliny as he pictures the scene of this 
malarial desert nearly two thousand years ago : " Such 
is its happy and beautiful amenity that it seems to be 
the work of rejoicing Nature. For truly, so it appears 
in the vital and perennial salubrity of its atmosphere, 
in its fertile plains, sunny hills, healthy woods, thick 
groves, rich varieties of trees, breezy mountains, fertil- 
ity in fruits, vines, and olives ; its noble flocks of sheep, 
abundant herds of cattle, numerous lakes, and wealth 
of rivers and streams pouring in upon it; many sea- 
ports, in whose lap the commerce of the world lies, 
and which run largely into the sea, as it were, to help 
mortals." 

EOME. 



MODERN ITALY. 



383 



CHAPTER XLII. 

NEW ROME. 

The City of the New Quartek — The Union Army of Italy 
AND ITS Civil Uses — Modernization of Rome — Convents 
AS Government Buildings — Unmuzzled Bookstores — 
Politicians and Engineers — The American Church — 
The Protestant Gravey^ard. 

Not the least among the astonishing sights of this 
famed and ancient city, and certainly the most unlooked 
for, is the New Rome tliat is arising every day strong 
and beautiful, clean and hygienic and kisty. 

This is an entirely new-built section, where every- 
thing is modern, fresh, and recent. Whole streets of 
newly-erected houses meet one's view, the streets them- 
selves wide and straight, well graded, and handsomely 
laid out, and the whole is of a few years' growth. It 
is such a quarter and development as one would ex- 
pect to find in Cincinnati or Chicago, but the last thing 
looked for in Rome. The buildings in this new quar- 
ter are not architecturally handsome. The houses are 
very large, rectangular structures, affording only plain, 
straight lines to the eye. They are, however, palaces 
in their spaciousness, being very broad, the fronts 
measuring from fifty to one hundred feet, and as high 
in elevation as the best blocks in our cities. They are 
convenient to live in, but not picturesque structures, 
and although entirely different in construction from the 
American dwelling-house, the long succession of them, 
all of the same style and pattern, gives the effect of an 
American street. They are also as devoid of historical 
interest or association as the w^ooden-paved '^ avenues" 
of a ten-year-old Western metropolis. This new city 
lies from'the Baths of Diocletian to the Esquiline Hill 
R 2 33 385 



386 MODERN ITALY. 

and extending back to the walls, taking in all the 
ground from the Porta Pia to the Porta Maggiore. 
The backbone of the section is the broad F^a iVa^iona^e, 
running from the new railway station to the Via 
Quirinale. The races were transferred from the Corso 
to this street at the Carnival of this year. There are here 
large modern hotels, a fine new theatre, a handsome 
American Protestant church up, ground broken for an 
English one, and grand rows of palatial " flats/^ Along 
with all this development there is the usual incident 
of rising prices and speculation. Italian speculation, 
however, is something very childlike and innocent to 
American experience. 

This wdiole quarter is a result of New Italy, and has 
sprung into life entirely since Victor Emmanuel got the 
reins and Cavour effected " The Union.'^ It is the evi- 
dence that Italy has awakened at last to the modern 
life, and is swinging into place in the column of the 
nations. While we may regret the loss of the pictur- 
esque and the absence of scenic effect, it is an encourag- 
ing and hopeful sign, welcome to all who do not believe 
in the saving grace of squalor and wretchedness, and in 
the godliness of dirt. 

There are many influences at work now to push for- 
ward the development of the Roman people. In many 
respects the people strongly resemble us. They have 
intelligence, versatility, adaptability to circumstances, 
ready tact, and a very practical vein. There is the 
same bright countenance, the same activity and light- 
ness of motion seen in the best type of the American. 
This is especially the case with the North Italians, who 
will be the brain and power of the new kingdom. 

The union of Italy, and the consequent birth of a 
national instinct, has given a powerful impetus to 
progress. Along with political freedom has come, too, 
the removal of the frightful mental incubus of ecclesi- 
astical tyranny. As long as an Inquisition could arrest 
men in the night-time and try them in secret for their 



^'EW ROME. 387 

beliefs and opinions, there was no hope for either moral, 
intellectual, or political advancement. The only relief 
lay through violence and bloodshed, and the odds were 
fearfully against the suifering victims. Now all that is 
changed, and the movement can go on, healthily and 
under the law. 

As matters now stand, and as they must stand for 
some time, the bayonet Is the saviour of Italy. It is a 
sad admission to make, but It is the truth, and measures 
the vast difference between the unhappy condition of 
this people and the fortunate circumstances of ours. 
The struggling people of Italy have secured their rights 
from the ecclesiastical aggression of ages only by the 
bayonet, and they hold them only by the bayonet. 
Disband the armies of free Italy, and the Church would 
reassume temporal power and rule in a month. The 
government of the people, for the people, would be re- 
placed by the government of priests, with Its hideous 
and appalling record of the last one thousand years. 
Education would give way to enforced Ignorance, and 
civil rights be lost utterly as the light of the courts of 
justice v,ent out In the hopeless night and outer dark- 
ness of the Inquisition. Americans, with their in- 
stinctive love of freedom, often resent the constant 
presence of the soldiery here, who throng the streets 
and stand on guard at every turn ; but tliey are in this 
case a necessary evil. It is unfortunate to have to rely 
on military power even for a season, but it would be 
still more unfortunate for Italy to abandon Its protection 
at this moment. It would be a treason to humanity 
and to the trust of government, for it would be sur- 
rendering, without a struggle, all the work and cost 
and blood of the last thirty years. 

Again, the army at present, in addition to Its mili- 
tary uses, serves as a good school to the young men of 
new Italy. It educates tliem to the conception of 
nationality, and accustoms them to the use of civil 
force against ecclesiastical usurpation. Heretofore, to 



388 MODERN ITALY. 

disobey a priest, who was in reality an unscrupulous 
politician, or to resist a corrupt bishop, has been looked 
on as a sacrilege and resistance to heaven, that might 
be followed by supernatural punishment. The people 
w^ere in the unconscious bondage of superstition, which 
can be best broken up by the constant visible presence 
of the power of the civil law. 

The soldiers of Italy are a fine-looking body of men, 
intelligent, cleanly, of resolute bearing, and in excellent 
condition and discipline. They are so far beyond their 
less fortunate brethren who are not in the ranks that I 
think the best thing, both for the State and the people, 
w^ould be to draft the whole remaining population, and 
let every male in the kingdom have the benefit of a 
few years' service. In each regiment the recruit gets 
a good elementary schooling in the common elements 
of education ; but beyond that he receives a moral 
training, inducing habits of self-reliance and self-respect, 
w^hich are just what the peasant and poor artisan need 
after a thousand years of priest rule. The army is the 
common school of Italy, and it is the best she can have 
at present. 

Again, it is the judicious usage of the war minister 
to shift the troops about, placing the northern battal- 
ions on duty in the south, the southern in the north, 
and so on, the very thing which is needed to break up 
the sectional and local feeling so disastrously strong in 
Italy. The young soldier, after his military service is 
over, feels that he is not any more a Genoese, a Pisan, 
a Neapolitan, a Roman, or a Florentine, but something 
better and greater, — an Italian. 

One of the most conspicuous features of new Rome — 
the Rome that is open and free — is the new American 
church on the Via Nazionale. This handsome edifice, 
built by the present rector. Rev. Dr. Robert J. Nevin, 
of Pennsylvania, has been put up only since the open- 
ing of Rome by Victor Emmanuel. It is of large size, 
even for this city of basilicas, and is constructed in the 



NEW ROME. 389 

early Gothic of Northern Italy. The walls are of 
travertine, the stone of the Colosseum and St. Peter's, 
and it is floored inside with Venetian pavement, — a 
kind of rough mosaic. The plan of the building is 
that of the basilica, with apse, nave, and side-aisles. 
The tower is of the campanile order, with ascending 
stories of airy windows, openings which let out the 
clear sound of the bells, a style almost unknown in our 
land, but which harmonizes admirably with the skies 
and landscape of Italy. 

This beautiful church, with its twenty-three bells 
ringing every Sunday over the seven hills, is a perma- 
nent monument to the free right of all men to worship 
God according to their own faith. It stands in the 
very camp of that great power which has always 
denied this right, and we can justly be proud that it 
has been placed there by American liberality, faith, 
and courage. Already the example is bearing good 
fruit. The Church of England is laying foundations 
for a church on the Quattro Fontanel and some six or 
eight congregations of various Protestant faiths are 
organizing and building over a city where for long 
suffocating centuries their worship w^nt up to God 
only from the torture-chambers of the Inquisition or 
the sacrificial piazzas of the auto-da-fe. 

Another feature of free Italy are the enfranchised 
bookstores. In the old times, under the dead hand 
of the Index Expmyatorius, bookselling, as may well 
be imagined, was not a very flourishing calling, and 
the shops had rather a meagre supply of still more 
meagre matter. To-day an hour in any good Roman 
bookstore will almost startle the stranger. The litera- 
ture of every nation greets one from the shelves and 
tables, — German, English, American, French, Spanish, 
and the Italian is not mainly theological or religious, 
as one unconsciously assumes, but largely devoted to 
the physical sciences and practical treatises on mathe- 
matics and engineering. For some reason politics and 

33* 



390 MODERN ITALY. 

engineering go together in Italy, as they do also in 
France, and this sympathy makes engineering a popu- 
lar and prominent study. The average Italian candi- 
date for political office is not a lawyer, as with us, but 
an engineer. 

Modern Italian literature, however, is comparatively 
meagre and liniited in its range. The popular want 
is, therefore, supplied by translating copiously from the 
literature of other nations, and it is surprising to see 
how thoroughly the better works of the world have 
been appropriated. All the standard English books 
and much of the current publications of the United 
States and England are reproduced in Italian. This 
is done promptly, and as that Canada thistle, the mid- 
dleman, has not yet overrun Italy, books can be bought 
there comparatively cheap. They are much cheaper 
than with us, when our enormous markets are taken 
into account. These bookstores of which I am speak- 
ing are not confined to the new quarter, but have spread 
all over Kome, and now in the low precincts of the 
Pantheon or even under the spiked guns of San Angelo 
one may see modern scientific tracts exposed for sale 
among little tin hearts and cheap rosaries and the votive 
offerings of all kinds so well known and so flimsy, rude, 
and gaudy. 

There is another movement which has operated 
largely to the modernization of Rome. The civil gov- 
ernment in succeeding to the estate of the ecclesiastical 
government has taken many of the old conventual 
properties for public use. Thus, all the departments 
of State — the War Office, the Navy, the Post-Office, 
the Foreign Office — are now quartered in fine large 
monasteries, and brisk-walking, cleanly-clad officials 
have replaced the filthy-habited, flea-haunted monks 
who made the city picturesque and dirty only twenty- 
five years ago. This kind of appropriation has been 
on a very large scale, and quite changes the face of 
many localities. 



NEW ROME. 391 

Just beyond the Ostian gate through which the holy- 
Apostle St. Paul was led to execution, and at the foot 
of the colossal j)yramidal tomb of Caius Cestus, the 
only surviving monument of Rome which witnessed 
his martyrdom, nestles " The Protestant graveyard," 
also a field of the Italy of the nineteenth century. It 
is ^' outside of the walls," but a century or so ago Rome 
was not either civilized or Christian enough for even 
that. 

This burial-ground is one of the loveliest places 
around Rome, and is full of tender and suggestive 
associations. It is the graveyard of those who die here 
out of the Roman communion, and is already, perhaps, 
the most Catholic spot in the city. Russians, Danes, 
Germans, French, English, Americans, Italians, and 
men I know not of what other tongues, lie here together 
awaiting the resurrection. Under its dark cypresses, 
and among its clustering roses, are some twelve hundred 
graves — a silent congregation from all the world. The 
title to the ground is vested in the German government, 
through whose courtesy and Christian charity and na- 
tional courage the j^eople of all the world find that 
consecrated rest which is denied them elsewhere in Rome 
by act of its Church. 

This quiet and beautiful spot, covered with violets, 
swept softly by fragrant winds, sleeping, as it were, 
out of the world, is so restful and soothing that it has 
a singular charm for all who see it. Shelly sang it long 



ago- 



" "Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead 
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread." 

His heart rests in it to-day, right under the ruins of 
an ancient loop-holed tower in the old Aurelian wall. 
Keats is there, William Howitt, Gibson, the sculptor, 
and long lists of names familiar to our English tongue. 
Most of the graves are of the young — a touching me- 
mento of blighted promises and broken hopes. They 



392 MODERN ITALY. 

are those who, full of youth and hope, were cut down 
on their travels — brides, perhaps, on their first jour- 
ney, or those who sought life in foreign lands and 
found death. By far the largest proportion of names 
are from England. The English do not have that 
semi-morbid desire for burial in their own land, under 
any circumstances, which presses so heavily on the 
American and Chinaman. On many of these tombs 
are read the names of noble and wealthy families of 
England ; but although England is so near, and her 
family burial-grounds are more beautiful and impressive 
than those of any other people, when an Englishman 
dies in Rome, no matter what his rank or position, he 
generally sleeps there. Here they are in force among 
the roses and lilies and oleanders of Italy, lords and 
ladies and children, admirals and generals with their 
slumbering effigies, poets and artists and travellers, at 
peace forever. Indeed, so peaceful and beautiful is this 
spot, so full is it of catholic association, so emblematic 
is it of the fellowship and brotherhood of the whole 
world, as it shall stand on the resurrection day, when 
all the tribes and tongues and nations of the earth shall 
meet together, that I do not wonder so many persons 
of note and educated tastes have accepted it as their 
final rest. 

EOME. 



UNITED ITALY. 393 



CHAPTER XLIII. 

UNITED ITALY. 

Italian Politics — The Great Work of the Union' of 
Italy — The Church in Politics — Settling an Estate 
OF Kingdoms — Sectionalism — North and South Italy — 
A Look into the Chamber of the Congress of the New 
Kingdom of Italy — English Features of the House 
— Monte Citorio — The Ministry — The Floor of the 
House. 

The union of Italy is the keynote of modern Italian 
politics and political history, and it has been a grand 
achievement. The more one sees under the surface, 
and meets the leaders of the several interests and par- 
ties, the more he is impressed with the consummate 
abilities and energy of the men who achieved it. Our 
own Union in 1776-83 was but child's play compared 
with the work in Italy of the past twenty years, and 
our pending question of reconstruction is simple aside 
of the problems yet to be solved in this country before 
it becomes one nation, thoroughly united in heart and 
head, with common interests, common hopes, and a 
common future. 

Let me for a moment briefly summarize some of the 
grand difficulties which have stood in the way. They 
fairly bristle as we call them up, starting back far 
through the centuries and enlisting all the human pas- 
sions. They are historic — of blood, of climate, of 
religion, of civic pride, of finance, of ignorance, of 
toj)ography. 

And first of blood. The Roman race is at its best 
but a conglomerate one, but Italy is not even purely 
Roman. Naples and the country round about it was 



394 MODERN ITALY. 

settled by Greek colonies, and the people to this day 
retain the peculiarities and show the traces of their 
Grecian ancestry. Sicily has even a marked proportion 
of Arab blood. Then, again, there is a North and a 
South Italy, far more marked in their differences and 
histories than the Northern and Southern States of our 
country. Their differences come from twenty centuries. 
Their special characteristics are rooted in the ages. But 
the dangers of sectionalism here are not limited to the 
clashing interests of two or three great natural sections. 

In Italy sectionalism means city pride. As men- 
tioned in a previous letter, the city has been the politi- 
cal unit of Italy for all its known and even legendary 
history. The walled city held no communication with 
its neighbors, save those of war, and they knew each 
other only by feuds and forays, or formal treaties with 
each other against others. Even to-day the people of 
one Italian town talk of each other as foreigners, and 
speak commonly of Genoese, Milanese, Neapolitans, 
Romans, Florentines, Pisans, just as they do of French, 
Germans, English, or Americans. It is in their blood 
and will not go out inside of this generation. They 
have to be educated, not from the conception of a prov- 
ince or a state up to the idea of nationality, but from 
the very primitive start of the municipal idea. 

Again, there are the geographical troubles. Large 
portions of the new nation, such as Sardinia and Sicily, 
are islands ^^ cut off," of course, from the instantaneous 
communication of rail^ — the new artery of the modern 
body politic. Even the mainland is not compact, but 
straggles through changing climates, inducing different 
modes of living, and therefore different habits and 
customs. 

There is a North and a South Italy, with differences 
of temperament and tastes just as wide and deep-seated 
as any that exist between our Northern and Southern 
States. There is, indeed, a rather curious parallel be- 
tween our two nations in this, North Italy holding 



UNITED ITALY. 395 

much the same relation to South Italy as do our 
Northern States to our Southern ones. In the North- 
ern Kingdom of Italy the people are industrious, active, 
and comparatively prosperous. Their children go to 
school. They themselves fall in as far as they can 
with the thought and movement of the age. The hold 
of the Roman Catholic Church loosens first in the 
North. Humbert, the Union king, comes from the 
Northern house of Savoy. 

As you go southward these characteristics gradually 
weaken and disappear. Industry gives way to idleness, 
activity to laziness, school training to ignorance, religion 
survives In superstition, and the dirty mendicant monk 
becomes the true representative man of the country. 
The statistics of Italian illiteracy run exactly as do 
ours, from North to South. From the latest data In 
the Annuario Statistico, it appears that in every thou- 
sand of the population the number that could neither 
read nor write, in 1871, was. In Piedmont, five hundred; 
in Lombardy, five hundred and twenty-eight; in Tus- 
cany, seven hundred and twenty-four; In the Roman 
provinces, seven hundred and seventeen ; in the Neapol- 
itan district, eight hundred and fifty-six; and in Sicily, 
eight hundred and seventy-two. It Is the same de- 
scending scale as from Maine to Mississippi. 

Worst burden of all for Italy is this appalling Igno- 
rance of the mass of the people, habituated for genera- 
tions to a galling slavery of body and mind, ruled and 
owned from the cradle to the grave by priest or prince, 
and unused to self-management, self-providence, or self- 
control. These people, when brought face to face with 
the question of self-government, are pitifully ignorant. 
Ignorance is always suspicious, and they therefore mis- 
trust experienced leaders, and are more apt to be con- 
trolled by unscrupulous cunning than intelligently con- 
vinced by argument. By a law of nature large masses 
of Ignorance always gravitate against Intelligence, and 
the party that raises and frees this people must expect 



396 MODERN ITALY. 

to have them tarn against it. At this moment, Gari- 
baldi, leading the radical element, and the Pope, rep- 
resenting the reactionary forces of the Vatican, alike 
agree in advocating universal suffrage. Garibaldi asks 
it as a logical and necessary step in his plan, accepting 
the immediate risk in the faith of the good that is to 
come. The Papal power is willing for this revolutionary 
step, knowing that it would bring to the polls legions 
of the contadini, the ignorant peasantry of the villages, 
who can neither read, write, nor think, and who are 
controlled absolutely by their priests. At present suf- 
frage is based on a property qualification, and is con- 
fined to a comparatively small proportion of the popu- 
lation. The qualified voters of Italy are, by last 
statistics, just 2.26 to every one hundred of population, 
and, on an average, only sixty per cent, of the vote is 
ever polled. Were the doors opened to manhood suf- 
frage the mass of the Italian vote would be directed 
straight from the Vatican, and cast against the party 
of union and freedom. 

The great disturbing element, however, — the ugliest 
trouble of all, — is the political claim of the Roman 
Catholic Church. Its relation to Italy is not at all a 
religious one, as in our country, but a definitely political 
one. It is not even the vexed question of Church and 
State — it is State or Church. The Roman Catholic 
sovereignty here claims the temporal dominion of the 
old States of the Church as its riojht, and is fio-htino; 
for it to-day by every means in its power. It excom- 
municated Victor Emmanuel, and would excommunicate 
King Humbert and the two Chambers of Parliament, 
and all the personnel of government in an hour if it 
would do any good. It is a political imperium, in im- 
perio, and a power of such strength and ramification 
that it cannot be struck down without endangering the 
very structure of society. At this very day the king- 
dom of Italy is paying to the Pope, an active worker 
for its overthrow, an annual tribute of over six hundred 



UNITED ITALY. 397 

thousand dollars. Imagine some vast, restless power 
in our land which controlled, nominally, at least, the 
religious belief of the entire population ; which owned 
every church-building in it, with one or two exceptions, 
and directed all the worship in them ; which had a vast 
machinery of paid, organized forces, men and women, 
always at work, and which, entering into every family, 
north, south, east, and west, and influencing all their 
members in their most sacred relations, reaching them 
in the cradle, at school, on the marriage-day, and at the 
hour of death, was restlessly and avowedly plotting for 
the overthrow of the government ; demanding it as a 
right, and adjuring all to aid in it as a religious duty ; 
imagine, further, that our people were so superstitiously 
devoted to this power that the government dare not 
strike at it, but must pay it a large pension — absolutely 
furnish it with means to carry on its claims — imagine 
all this, and you have some idea of the civil situation 
here, and begin to understand the appalling odds that 
confronted, and still confront, the leaders for union. 
They do not even hold their own camp. 

Bnt leaving the consideration of all these organic 
difficulties, inherent in the life of the people, when the 
hour of success at last came, and the act of union was 
consummated, the practical adjustment of the vested 
interests which Avere to be merged in the new nation 
was a matter of infinite tact, patience, and cost in money. 
It was, in fact, the settlement of an estate of seven king- 
doms. 

New Italy has been formed out of seven distinct 
kingdoms or powers, each one of which had a ruling 
family whose rights and interests society, the social 
order of Europe, recognized. The house of Savoy got 
the crown of Italy, but all the rest had to be pensioned 
or provided for in some way. 

Each of these kingdoms had its court, its army, its 
judiciary, its debt — all the machinery and burdens of 
sovereignty. The adjustment of these conflicting and 



398 MODERN ITALY. 

unequal iuterests involved endless trouble and infinite 
concession and compromise. The debts of some of the 
little countries were relatively heavier than those of 
others ; had, perhaps, been extravagantly incurred, or 
for ends distasteful and displeasing to some. The armies 
of each little power, too, were different. Some were in 
good order, others in poor. Some were relatively larger 
than others. In some the rank of the officers was rel- 
atively higher than in others, in some the pay, in some 
the proportion of officers to men. 

The same difficulties presented themselves in the civil 
list, and had to be adjusted — many of them by money. 
Pensioning was the easiest way, retiring the older men 
to make way for the younger, or the inefficient to make 
room for better. This, although expedient and neces- 
sary, was expensive, and hence Italy enters the family 
of nations with a respectable national debt. 

Our own political troubles and perplexities look 
small and petty when compared with these — but more, 
the leaders in the march to Italian unity have had to 
struggle against a moral opposition, — a traditional cur- 
rent of thought, — a stifling mental atmosphere, of which 
we know nothing. I heard a deputy on the floor of 
the chamber argue against the further extension of rail- 
ways in the kingdom, because the facility of commu- 
nication afforded the common people — the " working- 
men" was the word used — was dangerous to the good 
and peace of the country. '^ It produces," said he, 
^' discontent, socialism, nihilism. These have come with 
the railways into Europe." 

The longer and the deeper one studies Italy the 
greater becomes the conception of the union of Italy — 
the grander the proportions of the noble monument 
which Cavour has reared to bear forever his name into 
history. 

The other day, through the kindness of a senator, 
who showed me over the parliament building and in- 



[ 



UNITED ITALY. 399 

troduced me into the chamber of the representatives 
during the progress of an important debate, I had an 
opportunity of seeing the " plant" of the government 
and catching a glimpse of the legislative machinery in 
motion. The hall was arranged as an amphitheatre, 
the members' seats rising at a very steep ascent. The 
speaker and clerks sat in the arena, as did the cabinet 
of the king, who, as in England, have the privilege of 
tlie floor to defend or advocate their measures, and also 
that the representatives of the people may interrogate 
them at any time as to their conduct of affairs. They 
do not vote. The ministry shifts also with the par- 
liamentary majority, as is the English usage. In this, 
in the presence of the ministers on the floor, and in 
paying them salaries and not paying the members, 
Italy has patterned closely after England, refusing our 
younger precedent. 

The assembly seemed to be composed of men very 
much of the age and same relative station of life as 
the membership of our lower house at Washington. 
The house was quieter and more decorous than ours 
in the ordinary flow of business, but at one moment, 
when a little excitement did occur, it fluttered and 
quivered like a living thing in a way entirely impos- 
sible, perhaps, to a deliberative body of the Anglct- 
Saxon race. The little trouble flamed up instanta- 
neously all around the circled walls of the chamber like 
powder in a pan, and while the feeling was intense and 
the whole floor — speaking at once — seemed to throb 
and pulse with excitement, you felt convinced all the 
time that it was not deep or dangerous, and would die 
out safely, as it did in a minute or two, without leaving 
a trace. 

In this assembly the speaker calls the house to order 
by the ringing of a bell. It very effectually silences 
interruption and the discordant voices, but had to me 
something of a railway-depot effect, that being the sig- 
nal here for the trains to draw out. As in the churches. 



400 MODERN ITALY. 

however, they announce the presence of the Host by the 
ringing of a bell, it may have more dignified associations 
for Italian ears. 

The senate is appointed by the king, the lower house 
chosen by the people, the electors, however,- being but 
a limited portion of the population, suffrage resting ou 
a property qualification. Congressmen — deputies they 
call them — receive no pay, but have high social and 
political rank by virtue of their office, a deputy taking 
precedence of a prince. This is a wise provision in a 
country where social rank is so great a force. 

The congress of the new kingdom of United Italy 
does not sit in the old Capitol of historic tradition and 
legend, nor even on its site. That spot, so rich in asso- 
ciation and suggestion, belongs to the city of Rome, 
and civic pride will not surrender it for the uses of the 
nation. It is a municipal treasure, and will not be 
given up. The chambers, therefore, sit in a massive 
old palace, which has been remodelled for their use. The 
palazzo Monte Citorio is plain, but very substantial, 
and seats commodiously the five hundred members. It 
contains library, reading-room, committee-rooms, and 
all the usual incidental accommodations. As the new 
kingdom is poor, all the fitting up has been done econ- 
(fmically, and wdth a very praiseworthy avoidance of 
extravagance, or anything which could bear that in- 
terpretation. Economy, indeed, is the rule of the new 
kingdom, and is seen in everything that starts with the 
Union. The new cabinet ministers, for instance, receive 
salaries of but $4000. There are many expensive 
legacies of the past, however. This parliament-house 
is the only public building, civil or religious, I have 
seen in Rome which is not weighed down with statuary. 
There is not a single piece in it, nor did I see any paint- 
ings save one — a full-length portrait of Victor Em- 
manuel. All the embellishments of the halls, library, 
and reading-rooms were very modest engravings. Our 
country was recognized by^an old but g od likeness of 



UNITED ITALY. 401 

Washington, frame and all about one and a half by two 
feet in size. It would be a graceful act, and do good, 
if the Congress of the United States would send its card 
to young Italy in the shape of a large and full-size 
painting of the Father of that country whose Union has 
been the chart and sampler for the statesmen who con- 
ceived and are achieving the freedom of the Roman 
people. 

The library is small, but started on a judicious plan, 
and will grow into a valuable collection. The leading 
papers of each country in the world, received daily and 
preserved bound, is one of its features. In the reading- 
room you sit and read the powerful journal of each 
nation. Everything here, as in the building at large, 
was severely plain and sensible, the best materiel of all 
kinds, but no show. The committee-rooms were en- 
tirely devoid of ornament, frescos, or sumptuous fur- 
niture, in sharp contrast with our gorgeous civic salons 
for this kind of use. 

In the general service of the building there was 
something more of form than with us, but not as much 
as is common in a private palace here. AVhen one of 
the speakers arose during my visit to make his argu- 
ment, a servant iu full livery bore to him some wine 
on a silver salver. All the employes of the house, 
— doorkeepers, pages, messengers — were liveried, and 
in addition wore a band or narrow sash of the national 
tricolor bound around the left arm, its breadth and 
varying degree of ampleness denoting their relative 
rank. Further, these servants of the legislative 
chambers differ very greatly from those at the Capitol 
in Washington, in not being under the impression that 
they are the most influential personages in the building. 
Rome. 

aa 34* 



402 MODERN ITALY. 



CHAPTER XLiy. 

GAEIBALDI. 

The Eed-Shirted Leader at Work oisr a Sick-Bed — Pic- 
ture OF A Middle-Class Italian Home — A Military 
Headquarters with no Ked Tape — A Revolutionary 
Court — Crying the Daily Papers in the Colosseum — 
The Garibaldian Creed — European Eepublicanism — 
The Emergence of the Common People. 

Italy — Garibaldi. The two names reflect and 
suggest each other to the American mind whenever it 
thinks of the Roman people, or of Italian nationality. 
And it is almost the same here. There are three pic- 
tures one meets everywhere in Italy, — in the streets 
and shops, side by side, equal in the honor and affec- 
tion of the people, — King Humbert, Queen Marguerite, 
and Garibaldi. The soldier-king and the beautiful 
young queen are the fortunate man and woman who 
happen to represent in their persons at this hour the 
power of all the organized forces of society, govern- 
ment, learning, culture, aristocracy, property, for two 
thousand years. Twenty centuries are behind them, 
and combine to make them. Garibaldi is the orator 
of the common people. A man of themselves, — poor, 
simple in manner and speech, — they have raised him 
by acclamation to a seat beside princes in a land which, 
from time immemorial, has been the heritage of princes. 
His strength, too, represents a permanent force, and 
not an emotion or transitory excitement, for his power 
with the people is a sustained one, and has endured 
through an eventful life, checkered by poverty, mis- 
fortune, and defeat. 

Certainly, there is no man of Europe more worthy 
of study than this one, who represents the people in an 



GARIBALDI. 403 

age when their advent to political power threatens the 
whole structure of society as It has traditionally existed. 

I had the good fortune of visiting Garibaldi the 
other day, in company with the proprietor of one of 
the leading New York dailies, and my brother. Rev. 
Dr. Nevin, of Rome, whose influence with a distin- 
guished officer here, the chief of staff of the Italian 
army, had procured us a responsible introduction and 
an audience — the old revolutionary general being on a 
sick-bed, and too ill to see visitors except for good 
cause. 

The surroundings of the old hero, although severely 
simple, were ratlier dramatic, and thoroughly in accord 
with the popular conception of his person and habits. 
We found him in an obscure street, at the house of his 
son, — the house a very ])laln one, — and, for this town, 
small. The family occupied the second floor, what in 
the United States would be known as the third story. 
The narrow hall and steps all the way up were stone, 
hard and cold, and the hall-windows looking into the 
street had no glass in them, were simply apertures 
in a thick stone wall ; save In the sick man's bedroom, 
there were no carpets on any of the floors, but there 
were some brilliant and quite good frescos on the high 
ceilings. The first room along which we passed, and 
which was necessarily in full view of every visitor, was 
the kitchen, odorous and picturesquely dirty, as is the 
custom of the country. A young woman was at her 
work in it, careless of the fact that a historic character 
would eat of her food, and that a revolution might be 
brewing in the next room. The setting of the picture 
was, in fact, quite revolutionary. Two doors off, in 
the solid brick gateway of a large, cold building, stood, 
or rather lounged, three rough men, with the air of 
irregulars, — the very picture of a vigilance committee, 
— who eyed us closely and curiously as we entered the 
door. At the entrance of the Garibaldi apartments 
we were received by an old soldier, wounded, clad in 



404 MODERN ITALY. 

coarse, civilian clothes, but wearing the red shirt. He 
viewed us rather suspiciously, as had several Garibaldi- 
ans whom we passed, half-posted, half-lounging, in the 
porter's gate and entry, evidently looking on my 
brother's ecclesiastical dress with no friendly eyes, and 
as entirely out of place in that locality. The name of 
the Italian general, however, acted as a talisman. Dis- 
trust gave way to respect, and when we informed the 
old veteran that we were soldiers and Americans, come 
to see his chief, we had at once a warm friend at court. 
He had fought in America for freedom, he proudly 
told us, and welcomed his co-patriots with enthusiasm. 

Here I should say, that in order to secure a more 
satisfactory and uninterrupted interview, we had left 
our letter of introduction and cards the day before 
with a secretary, and arranged with him for a fixed 
hour to call. In true Italian fashion, this had been 
the end of that forethought. Garibaldi had never 
seen the letter, or heard of it, and we had to introduce 
ourselves with no word of announcement save, I sup- 
pose, the kindly commendation of our red-shirted 
comrade. 

Garibaldi lay on a narrow, iron-frame bed, of what 
we would call a hospital pattern, but which is of ordi- 
nary use here, his frame wasted, his face thin and worn, 
but his eye bright and sparkling, firing with enthusi- 
asm, or softening into warm and genial sympathy as he 
spoke. He called in quick and nervous tones for the 
letter when he found it had not been delivered. A little 
granddaughter scudded around the bedroom, hunting 
on tables and chairs for the paper. The old soldier 
ran to a large heap of letters and documents piled on a 
side- table, without order or arrangement, and tumbled 
them over and over, but without effect. Some of them 
bore the official envelope of the Quirinal. Some women 
from an adjoining bedroom took part in the hunt, but 
without results, and at last, as the sound of many voices 
all talking at once cleared, and the clatter of hands and 



GARIBALDI. 405 

feet stopped, the cry went up, '' Menotti has it !" 
Menotti was the son, and out of the house. 

The old general spoke with some little effort, but to 
the last with enthusiasm. He remembered America 
with friendly kindness, and seemed unaffectedly pleased 
when I told him that his name was a household word 
with our people. His eye kindled as he spoke of the 
united Italy, and seemed to thank the stranger that 
took the friendly interest to ask about it and express 
sympathy with it. In fact, the raison d'Ure of Gari- 
baldi is the union of Italy. It is his instinctive sym- 
pathies with every impulse in this direction which give 
him such a hold on the hearts, and make him the ex- 
ponent of the will and aspirations, of the Italian people. 
Union means the ultimate coming forward of the 
masses. Coming out of the bedroom of the prostrate 
soldier, I was curious to observe the manner of life of 
the man and his following. It was intensely democratic. 

In an ante-room there waited twenty-six people, six 
of whom were women. Some of the waiting crowd 
were foreigners, but the great bulk were Italians, and 
apparently quite poor. Of all the native attendance 
there was but one man whom we would call in our 
countrv well dressed. There was a committee of seven 
young men with an address, — a delegation from some 
Italia irridenta club, — a rather combustible-looking 
body. There was a poor woman, evidently come for 
help; the correspondent of the London Times; a 
bright, half-faded, dark-eyed woman of the adventuress 
type; some more veterans, come likely to snuff up the 
prospects for future work. It was emphatically a court 
of the people, and in it you seemed to breathe the air 
of uprisings and revolution. There was no formality 
of any kind, but work went on of itself — with earnest- 
ness if not with regulation. A secretary was writing 
busily at a small table in the centre of the room, all his 
papers and work exposed to the crowd. No cards were 
sent in, but the red-shirted soldier acted as master of 



406 MODERN ITALY. 

ceremonies, communicating with Garibaldi from time 
to time, and announcing results effectively by opening 
the door and letting in such as were called for. There 
was little furniture, and most of the visitors stood up 
while awaiting their audience. On a wardrobe-top, 
used for table purposes, lay some stray letters, news- 
papers, and a volume in the French language. I 
picked it up. Its title was La Papessa Jeanne. 

Garibaldi suffers great personal disadvantage in the 
likeness of him which has gone over all lands, and 
which is, perhaps, all that the photograph can do. He 
needs a painter to give him to the world, and a painter 
as great as himself. The accepted picture, which is 
known the world over, may be a correct map of the 
lines of his physical features, but it misses entirely the 
real man. It is heavy and rather stolid. He is bright, 
of fine intellectual cast, and with an exceptionally sym- 
pathetic smile that wins all hearts. It is this real, 
earnest, world-wide sympathy which has made him the 
leader of the common people of Europe. He is neither 
a soldier nor a statesman, he is an impulse and an 
enthusiasm. He has made military mistakes, and his 
political moves are often erratic to a degree. They are, 
in fact, not politic movements at all — simply straight- 
forward demonstrations, in season and out, for the end. 
His is the heart, not the head, power, and as the masses 
of his forces have, at present, no higher sense of action 
than the blind, personal following of some leadership, 
his is the force that is needed. Being without govern- 
mental power, he has no responsibilities, and so far 
does not need the strength of judgment and careful 
policy. He represents the asj^irations of a people that 
long for the morning after the dreary night of the 
Dark Ages. 

And nothing but loving sympathy can do the work 
for them. Nothing but that could sustain the leader 
or hold the trust of this people, steeped in the dense 
ignorance of centuries of slavery of mind and soul. 



GARIBALDI. 407 

Ignorance is alwi^ys its own hopeless foe by an inex- 
orable law. The io;norant man is suspicious by reason 
of his ignorance. The suspicious man is a ready dupe 
to cunning and low suggestion by reason of his sus- 
])ic;ions. When the battle of universal suffrage is fought 
by Garibaldi for the Roman people and won for them, 
they will turn against him and vote for the reactionary 
party, just as surely as did the negroes of the South 
w^ith us. He has faith, however, and is willing to 
make the sacrifice, trusting in God for the ultimate 
result. 

The struggle for the social advancement of the com- 
mon })e()ple on this spot is a very discouraging one. 
Even the centuries work against it. The other day, in 
the shadows of the Colosseum, I heard a faint, thin 
cry. A newsboy, a youth of some nineteen years, had 
come in with half a dozen papers on his arm, which is 
a fair load here. He looked around, advanced reflect- 
ively, called out two or three times: ^' II Popolo JRo- 
mano^' on a decrescendo scale, and then he too subsided 
into rest and meditation. The presence of the crowd- 
ing years was too much, and this is largely the history 
of all action here. The great national force is inertia. 

Garibaldi throws his great political influence w^ith 
the king, who in this stage of affairs represents United 
Italy. When he came to Rome, some ten days since, 
weak and sick, carried almost like a dead man from 
the depot to his son's house, amid the cheers and wail- 
ing of the populace, the king paid him the first visit. 
Some days later Garibaldi repaid it, going in a carriage, 
which he was not able to leave. He was driven into 
the lovely gardens of tlie Quirinal, when the king came 
down, and, entering the carriage, sat with him during 
the interview. His relations with the established gov- 
ernment are cordial and complete; in fact, he is drawing 
a large pension from the State. 

While accepting the crown as the representative to- 
day of established government and Italian union, and 



408 MODERN ITALY. 

throwing his influence with it in the interest of order, 
Garibaldi is in no way satisfied with the administration, 
and his political position is on the extreme left of the 
Lefts. It is doubtful, however, if he would be satis- 
fied with any government. He is a poet, although a 
writer of bad verses, and lacks the practical grasp of 
statesmanship. It is his mission to arouse and destroy, 
not to protect and administer. 

It would be a mistake to think of Garibaldi as an 
American Republican. He is a born revolutionist, with 
all those dangerous beliefs which European conservatism 
have made the creed of European Republicanism. So- 
cialism, communism, nihilism, have his undoubted 
sympathies, and I think he would gladly break up the 
present order of society at any immediate cost. With 
the assassination of kings he has expressed more than 
sympathy. His deliberately written words are those 
of encouragement. It sharply defines the contrast 
between European and American Republicanism, be- 
tween the fortunate condition of the people of America 
and the desperate state of the masses of Europe, to 
remember that assassination, which with us is never 
regarded save as an immixed crime and a cowardly one, 
is, in Europe, dispassionately, and often intelligently 
considered as a political weapon, and that not as a 
remedy for evil, but merely to call attention to it. It 
is in many cases a deliberate act of self-immolation. 
Garibaldi has all his life been heading forlorn hopes 
against the entrenchments of privilege and vested 
power, and his feelings very naturally are very differ- 
ent from those of men who have never had to fight 
this battle. 

For a whole lifetime Garibaldi has been the mover 
of the oppressed peoples of Europe, leading them in 
one desperate effort after another that has always ended 
in his defeat and disaster. To-day, as he nears death, 
his body worn away by the force of the still living and 
powerful soul within it, it is dramatic to think that he 



GARIBALDI. 409 

stands, like the leader of old on Pisgah's top, almost 
in reach of the promised land of his hopes and proph- 
ecies. In Germany an appalling military despotism, 
like a blind fate, is forcing the question of human rights 
to a violent issue on a grand scale. In England, to-day, 
the social and political power of the common people is 
steadily growing healthily and peacefully. In France 
they stand a guard in possession of the government. 
In Italy they wait in hope, nnder, perhaps, the freest 
constitutional government of the continent. In Russia 
they are blindly rising in crime and blood — illogically, 
illegally, but in a way that is striking terror into organ- 
ized society all over Europe, and forcing the consider- 
ation of the situation on the fears and conscience of 
those now fortunate classes who, for a thousand years, 
have enjoyed the trust of government without ever 
being called on for an account of their stewardship, or, 
perhaps, ever thinking much of their responsibility. 

KOME. 



CHAPTER XLV. 

MODERN ITALY. 

Keeping the National Holiday of the Union — The People 
OP New Italy — Transition Contrasts — The American 
and Italian Physique — The Heirs op Imperial Kome — 
Common Life in Italy — Modern Italy — Public Build- 
ings — The Eoman Sunday — The Newspapers. 

To-day, being the first Sunday in June, is the 
national holiday, — the Fourth of July of New Italy, 
— and it has been kept with a good deal of enthu- 
siasm ; the more so, perhaps, as it falls this year on 
Whit-Sunday, and both parties, the " blacks" (papal) 
and the " whites" (national), can join in gentle vivas 

and wearing flowers. 

s 35 



410 MODERN ITALY. 

The streets were crowded all day long with well- 
dressed and intelligent-looking people. It has seemed 
to me that the throngs on the streets and piazzas were 
of a better class of persons — more prosperous, and 
brighter looking in face and manner — than those who 
turn out on the Church fete days. They are the people 
of New Italy. Among them were groups of peasants, 
men and women, — the men in their sheepskin clothing, 
and the women with their red shawls, outside corsets, 
and Ionic head-dress, giving local color to the scene, and 
relieving the otherwise dead level of the respectability 
of the multitude, which looked much like an American 
crowd. 

The main feature of the day was a review of the 
troops and their parade before the king and the queen 
and their court. Some five thousand infantry were in 
line. The soldiery were in very good condition for 
field service, but they had not that finish of drill and 
accuracy of movement which our army had attained 
generally before its disbandment in 1865. Wherever 
I have seen the Italian troops this creditable feature 
comes out. They seem to be drilled and handled with 
constant reference to effective field use, and compara- 
tively little attention paid to the parade side of the 
training. They always march with a long, swinging 
quickstep, and have achieved a wonderful celerity of 
movement. 

After the review, the troops were formed in double 
lines, faced inward, along the broad and handsome Via 
Nazionale, leading to the Quirinal, and through these 
lines rode the queen in an open landau, with ladies and 
officers of state. Following her, about five minutes 
later, the king rode down the lines on horseback, ac- 
companied by Prince Amadeo of Spain, a large and 
brilliant staff, and his body-guard, which is not a show 
troop of costumed dragoons, but an effective body of 
cavalry. I had the opportunity some weeks ago of 
inspecting this troop at their barracks, and was sur- 



MODERN ITALY. 411 

prised to find how thoroughly they were equipped for 
field service, and how tiioroughly the officers accepted 
this as their work, never for a moment seeming to think 
of themselves as being set apart for mere escort or 
ornamental duty. 

As tne queen passed down the street there was a 
graciously hearty acclamation from the dense crowds 
which surged on both sides against the living walls of 
soldiery, — and it was repeated when the king appeared. 
The demonstration, however, while real and kindly, 
was not as vigorous as is our American fashion. I have 
seen a governor received in Philadelphia with far louder 
cheers and much more violent enthusiasm. The vivas 
and hand-clapping rather reminded me of the fashion- 
able repressed and kid-glove encoring of our Academy 
of Music. Perhaps this may be explained by saying 
that the lower classes of the Italians have as gentle 
manners as the higher classes of Americans. I noticed 
this particularly in the behavior of the troops towards 
the people. They held their lines always intact and 
kept the street clear, but without a rough word or 
action, — officers and men had the manners and demeanor 
of gentlemen in a ball-room throughout all the move- 
ments. 

The display of bunting was very moderate, and not 
at all equal to the ordinary American demonstration 
on the Fourth of July. The flags were few and small 
compared with our show on such an occasion. Indeed, 
the very largest in size was an American one, which 
floated from the campanile of the American Church, and 
directly under which the royal party passed. 

In the evening there was an illumination of the city 
in honor of the event. Roman fireworks are noted the 
w^orld over for their excellence and cheapness, and the 
display was creditably brilliant. The old Castle San 
Angelo, the centre of the illumination, stood out 
grandly, like a fortress of fire, and, as the successive 
explosions of the fireworks boomed through the city, 



412 MODERN ITALY. 

one could almost imagine that some of the old warrior 
popes were at their work again. The Vatican was dark 
and silent. The national /^^e of to-day is a State anni- 
versary, held in honor of the adoption of the modern 
constitution. As the pope is virtually a dethroned ruler 
here, and still keeps up his claims to the temporal sover- 
eignty of his old kingdom, he Avould hardly be expected 
to join in the celebration of the adoption of the liberal 
constitution under which King Humbert administers 
the government. 

The transition from the absolute autocracy of the 
Papal government to the very limited monarchy of the 
United Kingdom has not been a quiet or easy one, and 
the ecclesiastical and civil parties stand w^idely apart. 
Under the old regime the Church had gotten to be the 
main land-owner of the country. Two-iifths of all the 
real estate was said to be in its possession. The new 
government found it necessary to confiscate a large por- 
tion of this and return it to healthy uses. Laws were 
passed appropriating large properties for the immediate 
use of the government, and providing for the gradual 
extinction of the monastic establishments, which had 
grown plethoric with estate and meagre in membership. 
To-day nearly all the great department buildings are 
confiscated convents, and many others have been sold 
or rented for private purposes. These buildings often 
still retain their old legends and titles, and the effect is 
singularly confusing, and at times odd. 

Over a restaurant, for instance, on this street you see 
ave gratia plena. The headquarters of the police de- 
partment, which, however, is itself a somnolent institu- 
tion compared with Scotland Yard or an American 
" Central Station," is full of ancient inscriptions from 
the catacombs in erudite abbreviated Latin. Along the 
front of a pension, not far off, I read every day that fine 
old sentence from one of the fathers : " Per varias heic 
(Etates et tempora vitce omnes atque wternam tendimus 
patriam/' and " Dis Manibus/^ from half a dozen tombs, 



MODERN ITALY. 413 

meets me every time I ascend the stairways to my own 
rooms. 

In fact, the intrusion of classic association and tra- 
dition into the commonplace life of every day is inces- 
sant. Every morning our butter comes on the table 
stamped with an image of the she-wolf suckling Rom- 
ulus and Remus, a favorite print here ; and it is a sad 
come down to read S. P. Q. R. — those imperial initials, 
so fraught with transcendent power and meaning to our 
school-boy mind — on the municipal street-carts and the 
caps of the city lamp-lighters. 

It seems like calling up the spirits from another and 
far-off world ; and yet that world, [:)erliaps, was much 
like our own. Any one going through the galleries 
of the Vatican and Capitol, where there are thousands 
and thousands of statues and busts, would be struck, I 
think, with the likeness of the old Roman politicians 
of the Republican period to the politicians of our own 
country, particularly those of the South and Southwest 
of the generation just previous to the war. There is 
the same gaunt, meagre, self-reliant face and figure, and 
often that half-careless and shabby swing or slouch of 
the body. 

I have before mentioned that the Italian of to-day 
resembles strongly the best American type of this mo- 
ment, — the man with fine-cut, intellectual face, sym- 
metrical form of body, and light, elastic step, — that 
type which seems to prefigure the coming American 
man when the race shall have fully sloughed off the 
grossness and dross of its heterogeneous mixture and 
evolved its own distinctive form. 

There is even now a strong parallel between the 
physical appearance of the two people which you can 
trace down into detail and to classes. The soldiery of 
New Italy strongly resemble the best regiments of our 
volunteers. They are both the armies of freedom. The 
upper middle classes of Italy, the hope of the new king- 
dom, have much the appearance of the middle classes 

3.3* 



414 MODERN ITALY. 

of our own country, — the rank and file of the Repub- 
lican party. Both classes are doing the same work for 
their respective countries, — leading them up and onward. 

I may as well say here, for fear of misleading, that 
the Romans themselves acknowledge no kinship in any 
way with any Northern nation. From the high plane 
of their descent and traditions they look down on us 
all, English, Americans, Germans, and Russians, as 
barbarians. They are too polite to say this, and irre- 
proachably courteous in their demeanor, — noblesse oblige, 
— but, nevertheless, they think it. They are polite and 
kind, not because it is our due, but because they owe it 
to their name and heritage. This feeling of infinite 
superiority extends to the lowest classes, who all look on 
themselves as old families compared wdth the outside 
world. Notwithstanding, they look on all foreigners as 
a fair subject of plunder, — poor wrecks sent by a kind 
Providence to be stripped and overcharged. I think 
the stranger in Italy pays just about double for every- 
thing. I have seen oranges sold out of the same basket 
at one price to the Roman and at more than double to 
forestieri. A curious illustration of this is found in 
physicians' bills. The regularly accepted tariff of the 
average physician is, for a visit to an Italian, ten lira 
(about two dollars) ; for a visit to a stranger, twenty 
lira. The populace thus, by a motion of their own, 
levy a high export duty on all goods sold out of their 
country, or to be taken out, and even on services ren- 
dered to an outsider. 

Living is very cheap in Italy for many reasons. 
Labor is to be had in abundance at a few cents a day ; 
lodging or house-rent comes to little, because the solid 
stone dwellings, built for a once greatly larger popula- 
tion, are still there, and are a free gift to the present 
generation ; the cormorant middleman has not come 
yet, and the fish of the sea and generous fruits of the 
earth, olives, figs, grapes, cost almost nothing. But for 
the stranger on the trodden highways of travel, all 



MODERN ITALY. 415 

these things might as well not be. Among themselves, 
the commoner classes of Italy, and indeed of all Europe, 
live with an economy that is painful, and excites one's 
involuntary pity, but the traveller cannot share in the 
advantages of the cheap prices which this brings about. 
Accounts in France are kept in francs, and here in lira, 
pieces of about twenty cents, which tends to economy, 
the mind making that the unit of expense, instead of 
the dollar, as with us. The poorer people buy and sell 
and keep their accounts in centesimi, the one-fifth part 
of our cent. There is a small copper coin in circulation 
here in value two centesimi, — two-fifths of a cent, — and 
in Austria they have a coin of just half that value, or 
two mills of our system. It is almost impossible for 
us to feel that such a coin represents a distinct value, 
or can purchase anything, or be worth having or saving, 
but to the people of Europe it is a sharp fact. It is 
these centesimi coins, I fear, that make communism. 

The new central post-office on the piazza San Sil- 
vestro is a fair illustration of the way in which the new 
government is changing the face of old Rome. The 
building is a spacious pile of confiscated convent prop- 
erty. A convent in Rome, I should say, means what 
we commonly call a monastery. You enter it on either 
side by a handsome hallway, possibly fifty feet high, 
certainly forty, whose sides are adorned by immense 
panels of oil-paintings, — emblematic pictures of the 
genius of the railwa}' and the telegraph. Once over 
the tessellated pavements of these fine arches you enter 
a grand interior court. So munificent is the provision 
of room that this court or piazza is a beautiful square, 
one hundred and fifty feet in length and breadth, lovely 
with fountains, flowers, statuary, green plots of grass, 
and with a covered corridor frescoed on ceiling and 
wall and paved with bright marbles stretching all the 
leno;th of its exterior. Around this court the build in o; 
proper rises in three grand stories. 



416 MODERN ITALY. 

There are rooms and offices for every conceivable 
purpose, and those for the accommodation of the public 
nearly always in duplicate, — one for men and one for 
women. All these rooms are frescoed or painted, and 
equipped with furniture of massive style and artistic 
design. So lavish is the embellishment that the corri- 
dor affords a walk of six hundred feet of continuous 
pictorial design, much of it fantastic and quaint, and 
all on the theme either of the railroad or telegraph-wire, 
steam or fire. The building has just been opened to the 
public, and is daily thronged with groups of aesthetic 
Italians — which means the lower classes as well as what 
we call the educated — discussing with interest and ani- 
mation the taste and execution of the work. 

To present fairly the liberality and enlightened pro- 
vision of the Roman government, it must be remem- 
bered that Kome is a city not one-third as large as 
Philadelphia, and that its people do not have the 
habit of writing and communication. There is, for 
instance, no newspaper mail at all as compared with 
ours. There are no large business establishments 
flooding a whole continent or the world with circulars. 
In fact, the circular is not known here in our sense. 
Finally, of the quarter of a million people here, there 
are vast numbers who never either send or receive a 
letter. I doubt if the amount of business of this office 
is one-tenth that of ours. As an illustration of the 
different habits of the people, among the wealth of 
rooms in the building (and there are so many that 
they seem at loss sometimes, I think, to know how to 
label them) there is one set apart for the public and 
common use of any one who wants to write his letters 
or address them, or do anything of the kind at the 
office. This room, all brilliant with painting, had in 
it four small tables, neatly fitted out with stationery, 
ink, pens, blotters, etc., two seats to each table, and 
was, in fact, a charming little retreat. Just one seat 
was occupied. In Philadelphia, or New York, or 



MODERN ITALY. 417 

Boston, one hundred chairs would be kept pretty well 
filled. 

Even in so purely democratic a matter as post-office 
accommodation, both for the people at large and the 
men who serve them, we have something to learn from 
a monarchy. 

Sunday is the central day of the week in Rome in 
social and civil as well as in religious life. Parliament, 
or congress, sits on this day as on any other. Most of 
the shops are open, although the attendance at church 
is good. It is, in fact, a mystery to me where the 
people in the churches come from, as the streets are 
full and the town busy. Political meetings are gen- 
erally fixed for Sunday, although there are not many 
of them. The fresh cartoons appear on the walls and 
in the shops on Sunday. It is the visiting day, and 
the day for putting on cleanly- washed clothes among 
the poor people. It is a brilliant day on the Corso, 
that lively little avenue being crowded with equipages, 
and blue and scarlet with uniforms. In the evening 
there is always the opera of the week, and in the pri- 
vate houses balls and receptions. This social use of 
the day is not confined to the Italians or Roman 
Catholics, but holds among Protestants, and English 
and Americans as well, who readily fall in with the 
social usages of the country, and give their dinner- 
parties and receptions according to its customs. It is a 
national or Continental, not a religious, characteristic. 

It is to be said for the Italians, if we would present 

the question fairly, that, while it is perfectly natural 

and a matter of course among them to use Sunday for 

their pleasures and recreation, it is also perfectly natural 

and a matter of course with them, as it is not with us, 

to go to church and worship devoutly on week-days. 

Service is going on all the time in the numerous 

churches here, and fairly well attended. You can hear 

a sermon everv day in the week if you want to. Some 
bb 



418 MODERN ITALY. 

people here perhaps do. A good numlier hear mass 
every day, and a vast number enter their churches 
daily for personal and private prayers. If the Italians 
carry their pleasures into Sunday, as we do not, they 
also carry their religion into the six week-days, as we 
do not. 

The whole Sunday question is at bottom like so 
many others, one of climate and habit of life. The 
diiferences grow out of different modes of life induced 
by different clime and land. These people, having 
warm sun and soft skies the year round, live out-of- 
doors all the time, and have no family-life, in our 
sense, where the family lives from morning to night 
within walls to itself. They could not adopt our soli- 
tary observance of Sunday, simply because they have 
no close houses to shut themselves up in. Our ordi- 
nary habits of life to them would be imprisonment. 
They live on the street, under the trees, out by the 
fountains, in open gardens, in their cool marble 
churches, grand and lofty, and in the stone-flagged 
plazas. If they stop working on Sunday they must 
see each other. 

Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, there lived 
here a tailor called Pasquino so witty that his sayings 
were the talk of the town, and brought him custom from 
all, both high and low, who loved to come to his little 
shop and hear in clever phrase all the pungent scandal 
of the day. This tailor-shop was a kind of liberal club 
of those days. Right opposite it, on the angle of a wall 
of a palace, stood a large statue of some person — as 
is so often the case here — unknown. The friends of 
Pasquino after his death, unwilling to give up their 
diversion of witty criticism and satire, still kept on 
forging their sharp comments on public men and 
passing events, hanging them in written form on the 
l)ase of this statue for the amusement of the public. 
The statue very easily took the name of Pasquino. To 



MODERN ITALY. 419 

help the thing along, the statue pretended to talk with 
a neighboring river-god in marble across the way, the 
comments taking the form of dialoo:ue, or sometimes 
point-blank question and answer. From this incident 
we have our woi'd pasquinado. The sayings were 
written and put up in the night, the authorities taking 
them down in the daytime, but they could not stop 
people circulating from mouth to mouth the clever 
sayings which had been found there in the morning, 
and which were the news of the day. 

This thing kept up for generations and became a 
cherished usage. So exasperated were the popes, who 
w^ere severely lampooned, that they removed therefrom 
the river-god to the museum of the Capitol, and one 
of them, Adrian V., wanted to remove Pasquino also, 
and throw him into the Tiber. His owner, a duke, 
objected to this and defended him, and here he is yet, 
badly mutilated, little more than a trunk, but talking 
still. His last great pasquinado was during the recent 
sitting of the Vatican Council, when there hung from 
the stumps of feet one morning the inscription, " Free 
as the Council," a bitter epigram to those who under- 
stand the inside working of that caucus-ridden instru- 
ment of the Vatican "" machine." 

For centuries this Pasquino image was the only organ 
of public opinion in Pome, and so strong is the force 
of habit that public opinion to-day finds expression in 
this ^' placard" form in preference to any other. The 
newspaper has come, — a great modern institution, — but 
the Italian mind hardly receives it. It prefers the 
placard, and uses it in every way. Political attacks 
are made on cheap colored cartoons sold in the shops 
and on the stands as we sell newspapers. Peligious 
disputes are carried on in printed placards posted on 
the churches, and so many of them are they that they 
very thoroughly cover the town. Rome has been quite 
excited for some weeks over a dis(;ussion as to the 
adoration of the Virgin, and it is entirely carried on 



420 ^ MODERN ITALY. 

by printed posters. One morning you find a card of 
one side posted all over the place, and groups gathered 
reading it. In a day or two, or perhaps the third or 
fourth, — things move slowly, — appears a reply similarly 
posted. The people read it, and at their homes talk 
over it. Printing, of course, is cheap, and also posting. 
This usage extends even to advertisements, which will 
not go into the papers, although advertising is cheap 
enough, six to eight cents a line for one insertion. 
Does an Italian want to let an apartment he never 
thinks of advertising in a paper, but has a package of 
hand-bills struck oif, and placards the town. The 
little advertising there is in the papers is done by 
English and Americans. 

Under these circumstances the Italian papers, although 
there are plenty of them, are naturally thin and weak. 
They are all poor and able to spend but little money. 
The Italian does not ask for news with his morning 
maccaroni, and they, in consequence, do not give it to 
him. He knows nothing of the world outside of his 
city, and there is no correspondence. Only in one 
department do they compare with us, and in that they 
often surpass us. Their editorials are often strong, 
polished, timely, and scholarly. Here the paper, re- 
jected by the mass of the people for their common uses, 
has a special function. It is the channel adopted by 
the leaders of New Italy to reach the thought and influ- 
ence of the Nation. There is generally but one article, 
such as we call "editorial,'^ a real leader, occupying the 
first column of the first page. It grasps the leading 
issue of the day and handles it with vigor and depth. 
There is a scope and breadth about many of these arti- 
cles which reveal in their writers a large knowledge of 
the world, and that trained habit of thought which 
comes from the discipline of education. In this spirit 
and style the great questions of Church and State, of 
the right to the ballot, of the use of an army, of inter- 
vention or non-intervention in European politics, of 



MODERN ITALY. 421 

home political construction, and the hourly arising 
problems and complications of the new Union are daily 
discussed, and this high plane of discussion is one of 
the most encouraging and hopeful signs for the Italy 
that is to come. This is not, of course, the character 
of all the editorials, nor of those of all papers, but it is 
of many of them, — 'enough to give tone and a character 
to the general press, or at least a liberal portion of it. 

The reason for the strength and high character of 
this class of articles is clear, — they are not written for 
the mass of the people, who would perhaps be best 
moved by a very passionate and an ad captandum style 
of writing, but for the men who control and lead. 
They are the work of leaders reaching out to other 
leaders and men of influence and power. At present 
only these use the newspapers. The average Italian 
lets it alone. Hence the strong " Vatican" articles ; 
the strong ^' Parliamentary" articles ; the strong " Rad- 
ical" articles, which one sees every week here in the 
several leading journals. The newspaper is a real 
channel here for the statesman. 

The usual price for a daily paper in Rome is two 
cents. The circulation is small, but very many persons 
read the same sheet, — perhaps an average of ten. In 
time the newspaper will be a great popular institution 
in Italy, for the Italians are a people given to reading, 
and fond of talking about what they read, but at pres- 
ent it is foreign and strange to the ingrained habits of 
centuries and must work its way slowly. 



36 



422 MODERN ITALY 



CHAPTER XLVI. 

THE ITALIAN LIFE. 

Kinship of the Modern Italian and the American — The 
Visible Blood-tie of Thousands of Years ago — The 
Common Education of Italy and that of the United 
States — The Two Civilizations — Bright Side of Lower 
Class Life in Italy — Kule of the Koman Mind — Polit- 
ical AND Social End of Travel. 

When one goes to Italy expecting to find there in 
the people of to-day the full-blooded descendants of the 
Koman senators and imperial pro-consuls who stalked 
like demigods through our well-remembered school- 
books, he suffers, of course, a foolish disappointment. 
In race and blood the modern Italian is largely the 
same manner of man as we are. His national fibre, in 
good part, is like our own, Teutonic. Our race an- 
cestry in one great branch — say in the male line — is 
the same, and our common ancestor is not very far back. 
Some few thousand years ago our Teuton forefathers 
came swarming together out of those wondrous cavern- 
ous shades in Asia which neither Revelation nor history 
have yet illuminated ; and only about twelve to fifteen 
hundred years ago they separated, the Gothic branch 
pouring over Southern Europe, Italy, lower France, 
Spain, the Scandinavian branch streaming over North- 
ern Europe. Certain Gothic tribes flooded over the 
Alps into Italy, washed out the civilized people and 
government of the soil and camped there in history. 
Certain other tribes, their Scandinavian kin, pushed 
for the northward and westward to barbarous Britain, 
swept away the rude people and institutions, and made 



THE ITALIAN LIFE. 423 

their home there. Substitute the vanquished, savage 
Celt in place of the vanquished, polished Latin, and the 
modern Italian and Englishman, or American, are the 
same. When the Gothic Teutons that came into Italy 
submerged the people they found there and drove them 
out of history, they took from them a classic literature 
and art, and a social culture, that were the product of 
the two highest civilizations the world had yet seen. 
When the Scandinavian Teutons that came into Britain 
had disposed of its barbarian population, they found 
little there that was much better than themselves, and, 
consequently, took little by their conquest save the bare 
soil. 

In all this our modern Italian relatives have this 
great advantage of us : their fathers married into a 
better old family than did ours. But even in these old 
families there was a distant, although forgotten, rela- 
tionship, for the Celt and Latin were both of Aryan 
stock. The modern nationalities of Italy and the 
United States are not, therefore, quite brothers, but we 
are certainly cousins in the family of the world. 

It is this far-off but strong blood-tie which accounts 
for the elusive traces of similarity, sometimes in phys- 
ique, sometimes in mind, between the Italian and 
American which constantly challenges one's attention 
in Italy. The two people are so different and yet 
often so alike. The Italian is the American with his 
aesthetic and higher side fully and roundly developed, 
but to the neglect of his practical energies and lower 
activities. The American is the Italian with his lower 
or money-getting faculties acutely developed to the 
neglect of his aesthetic and higher culture. This is a 
rather blunt and not very complimentary way to our- 
selves of putting it, but it at least defines sharply the 
complementary relation which w^e seem to hold to each 
other as peoples. We are the same people differentiated 
by the special development for fifteen hundred years 
of different sides of our nature. 



424 MODERN ITALY. 

It is the advantage of comparative social studies that 
they enable us to see ourselves somewhat as other peo- 
ples see us, and as we cannot see ourselves. We Ameri- 
cans value certain things and prize them highly, and 
rank ourselves above all the world because we possess 
them, and despise those nations who do not possess 
them. The Italian values certain other things, achieves 
them, is proud of himself because he has achieved them, 
and contemns those who cannot understand his way of 
thinking and living. We despise the Italian as igno- 
rant and lazy; he looks down on us as rude and uncul- 
tivated. He is just as honest and sincere in his con- 
tempt of us as we in ours of him. The decision must 
come from some higher and broader court than either 
nation. 

The average Italian has leisure and cultivation, and 
he despises the American who has neither. The aver- 
age American has food and clothing and work, and he 
despises the Italian who often has none of them. 

Let us try to look at this question a moment with 
Italian eyes and not our own. In inviting a competi- 
tive international comparison the American would 
probably put forward as his first and strongest claim 
to superiority, " We are the better-educated people.'^ 
''No,'^ the Italian would surely say; "you are not. 
More, you are grossly uneducated. To be sure, you can 
all read and write and have an illusory proficiency in 
the lower branches of education, but in all higher edu- 
cation your national mind is a blank. Your average 
citizen can read type, but he cannot read a Titian or a 
Fra Angelico, as our humblest ])eople can. He under- 
stands arithmetic, or book-keeping, or contracting, but 
he cannot understand a work of Michael Angelo or 
Phidias. He would not know a Praxiteles if he found 
it on the roadside, and could not enjoy it if it were 
given to him. Even your wealthy classes are too 
uneducated to purchase intelligently in our art mar- 



THE ITALIAN LIFE. 425 

ket. We send over to you our refuse — slop-shop paint- 
ings and ready-made statuary — because you prefer it, 
and will not buy our best work. Engravings of the 
masters will not sell in your great cities against mod- 
ern, sentimental crudities that would not be exposed for 
sale in an interior Italian town. Your millionaires are 
incompetent to select the ' simplest picture for their 
swollen houses filled with all gross luxuries. The 
walls of their halls and drawing-rooms would often 
offend the eye and shock the taste of many an Italian 
peasant. You have a wonderful faculty for the prac- 
tical application of the exact sciences to common uses, 
which fits you pre-eminently to be laborers and traders 
for all the world, — to supply their bodily wants, — but 
you have not the higher flower of civilization, that 
culture and perfection of those nobler faculties which 
makes the whole man a desirable and gracious being. 
You are fit to be manufacturers and mechanics for all 
men, but not to sit with them. You have not that 
mental and social grace which make companionship 
with you desirable. You are excellent toilers and labor- 
ers, but you do not get higher, — you never reach the 
intellectual and artistic side of work. Even your 
professional mechanic is not the artisan of Europe." 

Now this reply does raise the question. What is 
education ? And if there are varying educations, which 
is the higher and better ? Which makes the higher 
and fuller and happier man? Which is the higher 
accomplishment, the power to understand at once and 
thoroughly enjoy a patent rat-trap or a piece of sculp- 
ture? Is it a greater national glory to produce a sew- 
ing-machine or a steam-tug, or a school of art? Is it 
a higher intellectual capacity to be able to read news- 
papers and science primers, or Correggios and Guidos 
and cathedrals ? 

Leaving this question open, the advocate of the 
American life would probably select his ultimate posi- 
tion in the general comfort and well-being of the body 

36* 



426 MODERN ITALY. 

of the nation, and from this intrenchraent argue, ^^We 
are a prosperous people ; every man among us is well 
fed, well clad, well housed/^ And so we are in com- 
parison with Italy or any other European people. 
^' But,^^ says the Italian, '^ granting all that, is the body 
the man ? Is its care and comfort the pursuit of hap- 
piness ? The corpulent hog is well fed and warm and 
well housed, but what is he ? You have attained phys- 
ical well-being and material prosperity at the neglect 
of the culture of the higher man. Your prosperous, 
well-to-do, perhaps wealthy man — the man you call 
successful — is often of coarse instincts, of ignorant man- 
ners, of unpleasant and vulgar address. He is devoid 
of that personal cultivation — the culture of his mind 
and affections — which makes association with him 
agreeable, and which, if he possessed, would constitute 
for himself a far higher and truer source of enjoyment 
than anything that food and clothing and gross luxuries 
of any kind, or to any amount, can bring him. He 
has sacrificed everything that is high in him to the 
getting of material comfort, and the best one can say 
for him is, that he can never understand iiis utter men- 
tal and moral poverty, his meagreness and un loveliness 
as a man. The poor Italian, with leisure, gracious 
manners, fine perceptions, refined instincts, and, withal, 
content; with a capacity to enjoy the highest develop- 
ment of human thought and genius, is an infinitely 
higher type of man. What is even your power of 
money? You can make money, which is the lowest 
relation of man to wealth. You cannot spend it, which 
is the highest relation of man to wealth. Our poor, culti- 
vated peasant is the superior of your vulgar rich man. 
Man does not live by bread alone ; our civilization is a 
moral, not a material one, and must not be tried by 
material tests.^' 

Here is another issue Avhich must be left to the decis- 
ion of some tribunal which is neither American nor 
Italian. 



THE ITALIAN LIFE. 427 

Whatever may have been oiir popular and conven- 
tional opinion of the Italian in times past, certain it is 
that the educated tliought and thinking travel, both of 
England and America, are every day pronouncing a 
higher verdict on the modern Italian. And it is likely 
that this judgment will strengthen as we come to know 
more of him from personal knowledge, and as we grad- 
ually lift ourselves more and more above a provincial 
plane of mind. 

The modern Italian has virtues which are not ours, 
an education which is not ours, a national wealth which 
is not ours, a national ambition which is not ours. He 
is badly handicapped by the centuries, but he has al- 
ready achieved wonderful things both in political and 
social advancement. He has broken the fetters of a 
superstitious bondage, of whose appalling and merciless 
power we have no conception. He has set out towards 
self-government, with the achievement of a federal 
Union of states in the fiice of obstacles which make 
our work in 1776 to 1789 seem crude and infantile. 
He has established an order of society by classes, super- 
imposed one above the other, but not so greatly at the 
cost of the lower orders as in England. One never 
meets in Italy the painful servility of the lower class 
Englishman. The Italian peasant has the self-respect 
of a prince. In this respect the social structure of 
Italy is a higher piece of work than that of England. 
The modern Italian bears a most burdensome national 
debt with a self-control and honesty which far sur- 
passes that of the average American State or city. The 
repudiator has not yet appeared in Italian politics. 

There is a positive wealth, too, throughout Italy of 
which we have no conception, for it is not our idea of 
wGalth, and cannot be measured by statistics, like iron 
and pork and cotton. In eveiy country town in Italy 
there are vast treasures of art of which the average 
American does not know enough even to go and see 
when he is over there. There are no circulating 



428 MODERN ITALY. 

libraries in the Italian provincial towns, and perhaps 
no reading-circles or book-clubs, those excellent insti- 
tutions of our country life, but there are museums 
stored with a wealth of art and sesthetic treasure such 
as no American city can have at all, however metro- 
politan its ambition, descended palaces filled with 
frescos and paintings and sculpture by the masters, and 
cathedrals whose architecture and statues are a liberal 
education in themselves. And cathedrals and palaces 
are alike open to the people. So overflowing is this 
wealth that it cannot be enumerated, and does not get 
even into the guide-books. The statuary in the lovely 
cathedral of Orvieto, for instance, almost unseen by 
the tourist, Cardinal Wiseman pronounces to be "the 
largest and most beautiful collection of the time of 
Michael Angelo." Orvieto is a town that over here 
might rank in our life with Carlisle in Pennsylvania, 
or the county towns of Massachusetts. 

Still more, the commonest Italian is able to under- 
stand and enjoy all this wealth of art and education, 
and does have his enjoyment of it. All through Italy 
the galleries and private palaces, with all their statuary 
and paintings and tapestries and furniture and carvings 
and marbles and precious stones, are open to the public. 
On Sunday, at least, they are absolutely free to all 
without cost of any kind. The princely families living 
in them on that day retire to interior suites of apart- 
ments, and all day long their halls and elegant salons 
and magnificent corridors and stairways are swept by 
the populace. Imagine for a moment the palaces of 
the Fifth Avenue, New York, or the costlier dwellings 
of Boston and Philadelphia being opened in this way. 
Yet this very week the costliest art treasures of all the 
world in the grand palaces of Florence and Pome ^re 
being exposed ill just this way. 

It is the most pleasing sight in all Italy, as it is one 
of the most suggestive, to wander into one of these 
lordly palaces on a Sunday. Sauntering quietly and 



THE ITALIAN LIFE. 429 

composedly through hall and chamber and gallery and 
state-room, you see little groups of the humblest Italians, 
private soldiers, laborers, peasants, with their wives 
and sweethearts. They stroll at will over the palace, 
at perfect ease, discussing pleasantly and intelligently 
among themselves the works of art. You always find 
them clustered before the best statues and the rarest 
paintings, arguing on their merits or pointing out to 
each other their hidden perfections. And this they do 
without the aid of guide-books or catalogues, which, if 
they had, they most probably would not read. They 
are far l)eyond the northern barbarian's stage of culture. 
Again and again this mortifying conclusion is forced 
on one in such scenes. Of the people in this drawing- 
room or gallery the Italians are of the lower classes of 
their country. AVhat do they show ? They have a 
perfect ease of manner, grace of movement and conver- 
sation, an intelligent appreciation of the master-work 
around them. The English and American people 
present are of the better classes of their countries or 
they would not be able to be here. And what do they 
show ? One-half of them at least only ignorance and 
vulgarity. Heavy-faced millionaires, looking bored 
and hopelessly lost among the finest treasures of the 
world ; overdressed daughters, giggling and awkward, 
uncertain how to move in a palace; wives with dull, 
expressionless faces, who you know are going to mis- 
pronounce English if they open their mouths. 

In personal refinement and cultivation and sesthetic] 
education the lower classes of Italy have reached a 
point of civilization beyond that of our poorer classes, 
and our classes of uneducated wealth, and it is needless 
to add, far beyond the similar classes of England. 
Here, indeed, is the presentable side of the Italian 
nation, for the higher classes do not seem to improve 
on the lower in proportion to their advantages. Their 
education is not advanced proportionably, and they 



430 MODERN ITALY. 

seem to lack in virility and nerve. The fire of con- 
quest, the lust of achievement, seem to have died out 
both from the Gothic and Roman lines of blood. 

Perhaps even here, however, the Italian would take 
issue and come in with a new claim. '^ We conquer 
not any longer by physical conquest, as did our fore- 
fathers in ruder days, and as you Northern nations essay 
to do now. We rule the world in these latter ages, not by 
force of arms, but by force of mind. The Roman Law 
to-day administers the justice of the world. You see it 
in the flesh in your own code of Louisiana, and on the 
statute books of Colorado and Utah, and it is the soul of 
the Equity Courts of England and the United States." 

" And the Papacy, — the Second Roman Empire, — is 
it not a magnificent demonstration of the genius of the 
Roman mind for rule? Is not this grand ecclesiastical 
empire the lineal successor of the First Roman Empire? 
Rome under the Caesars ruled the world for half a dozen 
centuries by force of arms, — under the Popes she has 
ruled it, or the greater part of it, for twice six centuries 
by force of intellect. She changed the form of empire, 
not the fact. And is it not a greater achievement to 
hold the mind of the world in subjection than its terri- 
tory ? This is just what Rome did when the Papal 
Pontiffs took the chair of the Imperial Pontiffs." 

Certain it is there is a subtlety in the Italian mind 
which is beyond our power to follow, and with which 
we cannot successfully compete. We may condemn it 
in morals, but there it stands in fact, an intellectual 
development beyond our own, a refinement or intensity 
of mental action which has not been given us. On this 
plane we cannot grapple with the Italian on even terms. 
On this field, which is one of mental force, he leads us. 

There is no greater good of foreign travel than this, 
that it gives us the opportunity for comparative con- 
trast and study of our own country, our government, 
our social institutions, our whole civilization, with those 



THE ITALIAN LIFE. 431 

of other countries. It is only against the background 
of other countries and civilizations that we can see our 
own, and detect their failings or defects, or dangerous 
tendencies. And these are the points we should look 
for and study. Where we are better than other nations 
— and that is, happily, in very many things — there is no 
danger ahead, and nothing to be won, and, consequently, 
nothing to be learned. Where we are behind other 
peoples there may be national danger in store for us, and 
there is certainly something to be achieved and secured. 
It is on this principle that in this volume I have con- 
sidered chiefly those features of foreign life wliich are 
superior to ours. 

The conditions of life for all in this country are 
much higher and more fortunate than they are now, or 
ever have been before, for any other peo])le. If there 
is power in the people to govern themselves, as we all 
believe, and on which belief we have staked our na- 
tional existence, there is no good reason why all the 
people of this country should not in time reach the 
privileges and culture and advancement which, in times 
past and in other countries, have only been reached and 
enjoyed by the very few at the cost of the many. This 
is our goal, and for this reason the liberal study of the 
institutions and civilizations of older countries is a ])rac- 
tical political and social duty of the American citizen. 
It is part of the education which he owes to himself 
and to his country, that he may discharge fitly and 
safely the high functions of his citizenship. 

To be of avail under onr structure of society and gov- 
ernment this education must come directly to the whole 
body of the people, and not to or through one higher 
class; and this, perhaps, under Providence, is the mean- 
ing of the surges of American travel which yearly flood 
the face of Europe, the countless hosts of a new race 
moving over an old world, with gentler manners and 
aims, but im])elled just as blindly and unconsciously 
as the fateful hordes of their Gothic forerunners. 

KOME. 



APPENDIX. 



T CC 



37 433 



APPENDIX. 



HINTS OF TRAVEL. 

Customs of Travel Abroad and at Home — The Eed Books 
— Some Unwritten Laws of European Life — Hand-book 
Equipment — The ' ' Impedimenta" — Koutes — Kailway 
Usages — Hotels — Luggage — Guides — Special Centres 
of Shopping — Food — Languages. 

In closing this series of papers let me hastily throw together 
some notes, the sum of repeated experiences, which may save, 
perhaps, to future travellers some time, labor, and the annoying 
quest of unwritten information. The usages of strange countries 
are more foreign than their languages, and it is these which the 
unfamiliar traveller needs to have translated. 

Routes. — Distances are so short in Europe that in travelling 
in any one country, or even between countries, it is hardly worth 
while to try to take everything in in one consecutive line or trip. 
It is better, if you wish to see any prominent person, or to be 
at any certain place at any fixed time, or to accept an invitation 
to visit, to do so, and double on your route for the rest of your 
journey. In other words, there is no economy in controlling 
your movements by distances, as there generally is in our vast 
territory. It is better to pay no attention to this, as railway 
fares will not be found to be the proportionately larger item of 
travelling expenses they are with us. It is the hotels that eat 
up one's funds. 

From the great centres of London and Paris, Rome and Ber- 
lin, you can work out everywhere with more economy than by 
trying to take in all you want to see on a consecutive schedule 
of time and route. Again, as a rule, there is no economy in 
Europe in buying through tickets, as there always is with us. 
One thousand miles of travel in England and on the Continent, 
made over the same route, cost exactly the same whether ^ow 
purchase one ticket for the entire route or divide it into fiftv, 

435 



436 APPENDIX. 

— except in the case of a few " circular" tickets purchased through 
agencies and sadly limited as to time of use. Further, when you 
are going to stop off frequently, a long ticket may become a posi- 
tive nuisance, so hampering and embarrassing are the conditions 
and limitations of its use. As a rule, it must be visM or endorsed 
by somebody wherever you intend to use it after having once 
stopped, and this form takes quite as much time and trouble 
as buying a new ticket. By a ridiculous inversion of thought 
and business tact, the railway regulations abroad are all made 
for the convenience of the railway and police officials instead of 
for that of the passenger. 

Luggage. — Contrary to the common impression at home, the 
arrangements for handling baggage abroad are better and cheaper 
than ours. The registering is just as safe as our checking sys- 
tem. The only difference is between a paper check and a metal 
one, while the train and station employees are infinitely more 
careful in moving and storing baggage than with us. Only the 
traveller must not attempt to take care of himself after the 
American fashion. Let him trust himself at once to a porter, 
who for a few pennies will arrange everything, gather his lug- 
gage together, remove it from the station, call a good cab, and 
give the proper directions to the driver. The traveller's only 
care should be to secure the most experienced and reliable-look- 
ing porter on the ground. He will place you in your carriage 
in a very few moments, and you will get from the station to 
your hotel much quicker, cheaper, and more pleasantly than you 
can make the same trip in any American city I know of. In 
Italy a cab for two persons, with a trunk and hand-baggage, 
will cost only from a franc to a franc and a half; in great Lon- 
don, for the usual course, not over fifty cents. 

Hotels. — Always select a small hotel al)road in preference to 
a large one of the same grade. You have better service and are 
more comfortable. Europe is beginning to build huge hotels 
after the American fashion, but they are not a success, and gen- 
erally combine the vices and defects of both systems. On the 
Continent hotels are advertised as first- and second-class. The 
first is the more elaborate and expensive house, and generally 
very comfortable ; the second is cheaper, everything is plainer 
and more limited, but of its kind it is solid and good. The sec- 
ond-class European hotel is not a shabby or nasty imitation of 
a first-class one. The proprietor is not ashamed of the grade 
of his house, but advertises it openly, and is as proud of keeping 
an excellent second-rate hotel as of doing anything else Avell and 
honestly, in which he differs largely from his American brother, 
who is always assuming to offer first-class accommodations for 
a second-class price. In England, the railway hotels, as a rule, 
are excellent, and travellers need not avoid them on principle, 



HINTS OF TRAVEL. 437 

as one does here. They are owned and managed by the railway 
companies, and as the road is so they are. 

Food. — Our country is, of all the world, the land of good food, 
cheap, plenty, and in rich variety. There is no European coun- 
try that can begin to compare with us in this blessing, and the 
American stranger abroad must expect for a time to really suffer 
for the want of his accustomed luxuriance of table. The poverty 
of an English hotel breakfast-table is something inexplicable, — 
sole bacon and chops is the same dreary fare all the kingdom 
over and every day in the year. Although true to her tradi- 
tional reputation for grand roasts of beef and generous legs of 
mutton, England does not have at all the sirloin steak, the high- 
est American conception of beef. Nor has she game in our sense 
and use of it. Coffee is never good at a British public table ; 
the tea, however, is generally excellent and superior to ours. 
Coffee in France is always good and tea poor. In Italy, at a 
provincial inn, both are looked on as curiosities, and served as 
such if one is erratic enough to call for them. 

The severe meagreness of an English or Continental table is, 
however, in its fruit and vegetables. They simply do not have 
them at all as we know them. At the private tables of those 
classes whose tastes are cultivated and somewhat cosmopolitan 
there is some provision of vegetables ; the fruit, however, will 
be only a miniature dessert course. At an English public table 
one gets a rigid and unvarying allowance of just two vegetables, 
— always the same, — potatoes and Brussels sprouts. These are 
invariably set before one at every inn without the least change, 
even when the green- grocers' stand in the same street may have 
onions, beans, cabbage, and others of our coarser and plainer 
vegetables in reasonable plenty for sale. I have had them some- 
times, but it was only on a special order and after serious con- 
sultation with the inn authorities. Fruit is rarely in the house, 
and if a peach, or bunch of grapes, or cherries are at last pro- 
duced, it is at the price of a peck or bushel of them here. 

It is this lack of fruits and vegetables, and the consequent 
want of their acidulous contribution to the blood, which, I think, 
makes Europe a wine-drinking land. The body demands this 
acid for the proper working of the system, and gets it in the 
wine. We get it in the fruit and vegetables we consume so 
largely and continuously. This same reasoning goes to show 
that we will never be a wine-drinking country, — at least while 
our present affluence in this kind of food exists. Our luxuriance 
of tropical fruit — bananas, oranges, citrons — is absolutely un- 
known to the common table of England. 

Hotel Expenses. — As a whole, the hotel expenses in England 
and in the larger cities of the Continent are much heavier than 
with us. The attendance is better, and more personal and indi- 

37* 



438 APPENDIX. 

vidual to each guest, but the provision and accommodations are 
more limited in their range. Even at plain country inns in 
such places as Reading, Chester, York, Carlisle, one must spend 
sixteen to twenty shillings per day, and then take rather plain 
meals. The best hotels in the same kind of tovrns in this 
country w^ould not cost over $2.50 to $3. The whole hotel 
life and management is so diflFerent here and abroad that it is 
difficult to institute any direct comparison of expenses, but it is 
safe to say that there is not in any large city of all Europe any 
hotel where one can get the accommodations of the St. George, 
in Philadelphia, the Windsor, in New York, or the Grand Pa- 
cific, in Chicago, for their moderate prices, or for anything like 
them. In the provincial towns of France and Italy, however, 
the hotels are good and very moderate, — two or three dollars 
covering all expenses, including a wine something better than 
the ordinaire. 

Guides^ valets de place, etc. — If you have any knowledge at 
all of the language of the country you are in, or a slight amount 
of self-reliance, avoid guides altogether, and especially those 
ghastly, flaccid, half-alive creatures who start out from behind 
columns and dark recesses in old churches or dog your steps in 
gateways and porches. It is better to miss some things than to 
have everything spoiled by the disagreeable presence and inces- 
sant, unintelligent, parrot-like recitation of a mendicant guide. 
If you are rushing through any town in a few hours, it may be 
necessary to employ a guide to find your way and economize 
your minutes ; but if you have reasonable time, any intelligent 
man can readily see everything for himself with the aid of his 
hand-book. Wherever you take a professional guide you lose 
absolutely the impression and associations of the place. 

'The red books. — There is no greater saving in travelling — 
saving of time, money, fatigue, temper, and opportunity — than 
that which is made in the procuring of good guide- or hand- 
books. It is economy to be extravagant in the way of buying 
them. 

In the English and French provincial towns which one may 
want to see thoroughly one always finds two or three local guides, 
— shilling or two-franc pamphlets. It is best to buy them all. 
Each will be likely to have some feature worth its cost. 

The very best of foreign-edited guide-books as a series are 
Baedeker^s. They are wonderfully minute and explicit, giving 
a street-plan of nearly all towns of any size or interest, and 
going into the detail of expenses of cabs, tramways, hotels, 
rooms, lights, fires, restaurants, etc., in each town, and also of 
railway fares. The series now covers pretty much the travelled 
world, excepting our own country. They are very honest and 
upright in their editorship. I have always found their informa- 



HINTS OF TRAVEL. 439 

tion reliable, and never detected any evidences of blackmailing 
or advertising in the text, which is more than can be said of a 
good many hand-books. They are also portable, — a very essen- 
tial requisite, — and reasona))le in price. 

Baedeker''s series have also the advantage of being pul)lished 
in French and German as well as English, and by getting the 
edition in one of these tongues one can perfect himself in a 
foreign language in using them. 

Black's guides are good in their excellent pictures of places, 
rivers, and scenery, fine wood-engravings of good design and 
finish. I have never used their text. 

Murray''s series are elaborate and crowded with matter, but 
rather undigested and heavy. They seem to suit the English 
traveller better than the American or Continental. 

The Satchel Guide, issued from Boston, is an admirable little 
work for Americans who want to make a hurried two or three 
months' run over Europe. It is schohirly and practical, and 
also thoroughly honorable and trustworthy in its information. 

Whitaker'' s Almanac, large edition, is an almost indispensa- 
ble companion for any one travelling in England who wishes 
to make an intelligent study of the country as he goes along, 
and to acquaint himself with its higher interests, machinery of 
government, form of society, diplomatic relations, etc. It can 
be had anywhere in London. 

The Sportsmayi s Guide, an established British publication, 
is invaluable as a directory of private estates, and of hunting 
and fishing leases over England and Scotland. 

John Bellows' English-French and French-English pocket- 
dictionary is, in some mechanical respects, the most wonderful 
book ever published, and the very best thing to be had in the 
way of a travelling dictionary of the languages. The genders 
in French, for instance, are all distinguished by types, a femi- 
nine word, wherever used, being printed in Italic. Many other 
things are thus presented at once to the eye by the use of typo- 
graphical signs. The condensation of incidental information is 
also something admirable. It is a volume of only a few — two 
or three — inches in size, bound in fine flexible morocco for 
pocket use, rich in excellent miniature maps and carefully 
worked-out tables ; costs fifteen shillings, but is amply worth it. 

In visiting in Italy there are numerous French and German 
works of travel M'hich it is desirable to get and read. One not 
only reads up the country thus, but enjoys the advantage at the 
same time of seeing it through French or German spectacles as 
well as his own, and of studying the French or German mind 
in the same act with the Italian character. You make thus a 
comparative study of three or four nationalities instead of one. 
This process can be reversed, of course, according to what 



440 APPENDIX. 

country one is in, as all the European countries with literatures 
have written of one another. The newspapers of each land and 
city are also very useful in the way of letting one rapidly into 
the current life of the country. 

Learning Languages. — It is a common impression that foreign 
languages can be " picked up" en route as an incident of travel. 
Adult travellers, I think, will find this a mistake, and their ina- 
bility to do this will be in proportion to their intelligence and 
mental vigor. The education of travel is a higher one than that 
of the grammar book, and the mind has too much on hand to 
grasp with interest the small detail of words and idiomatic rules : 
and unless it does grasp them with vigor there is no retention 
of them. One can study history, politics, social science, on a 
flying tour, but hardly languages. 

Travelling-parties. — All over Europe the cab, hansom, or 
voiture is hired by the course or the hour, as you please, but 
you pay for the use of the whole cab, and not for the number 
of persons carried, as often with us. The ordinary vehicles 
have seats for either two or four. It costs, therefore, as much 
for one person as for two, for three as for four. The fee, also, 
at a gallery, palace, or museum on the Continent for one will 
do for two, and a party of four would pay the same as three. 
In dining, also, a whole bottle of wine costs a trifle less than 
two half-bottles, and is better 5 and in the restaurants, as in 
our clubs at home, two can make a better and cheaper dinner 
by ordering a number of courses of one portion than either 
could by ordering separately. 

A single gentleman en route pays also about as much to the 
servants at the hotels — garcjons, chambermaids, concierge, etc. 
• — as he would if accompanied by a wife. 

Two or four is, therefore, an economical party of travel. 

Shopping. — As to shopping, which holds such a prominent 
place in the minds of intending travellers, all idea of it had 
laetter be abandoned at once. With the exception of certain 
local specialties, some of which are noted farther on, the Ameri- 
can will get everything cheaper and better in his own country 
than abroad. I do not mean to say that there is nothing in 
Europe which we do not have in our home stores at the same 
rates. In London and Paris there are unquestionably many 
articles sold cheaper than our best stores can afford to offer 
them, but the stranger will not get them. There is one price 
for home customers and another for "foreigners" all over 
Europe. 

As a rule, the American can do better by purchasing at home, 
where he is known and where it is the merchant's interest to 
retain his custom, than by venturing among the sharpers of 
strange towns. 



HINTS OF TRAVEL. 441 

There are certain special centres worth mentioninc;, however, 
which are the homes of certain manufactures, where really 
good articles may be had very cheap, and where the articles 
themselves have some additional value as mementos. For 
instance, Oxford is the best place in the world to buy Bibles, — 
the King James's version ; Dieppe for ivory-carvinp;, crosses, 
bracelets, card-cases, hair-brushes, etc, etc., in wonderful 
variety of designs and wonderfully cheap, as the carving is 
a small home industry, whole families working all the year 
round in their own dwellings at this labor and selling their work 
in their little village homes ; Genoa for silver filigree-work and 
velvets ; Venice for its wonderful colored glassware and beauti- 
ful toys ; the Swiss towns for wood-carving, but the wood is apt 
to warp in our dry climate ; Naples for raw-silk clothing ; Pisa 
for small marbles and casts 5 Inverness for Scotch tweeds : Dub- 
lin for itlsters and Irish linens; Berlin for amber ornaments-, 
Italy for coral ; Scotland for pebble and cairngorm jewelry ; 
Brussels for laces; silks and velvets from the "Lyons looms;" 
London for India shawls and goods, if you cannot get to India ; 
Paris and Naples for kid gloves. 

Gratuities, fees, vails. — A petty but endless trouble of the 
traveller in Europe for the first time is the matter of gratuities. 
You give a trifle all the time to every one who does you the 
least service. Even for an apparently friendly word of infor- 
mation on the street you are expected to pay in this way. In 
England it is " a tip ;" in France, the pour-boire ; in Italy, hnono 
manu, — " the good hand;" in Germany it is trinkgeld, — "'drink 
money ;" in the East backshish. It is not much money in any 
one instance, but foots up pretty well after an active day's 
work. The practical trouble, however, is to know ivhat to give. 
The inhabitants and the servants themselves know exactly 
what they are entitled to, for it is a matter of right just as much 
as any other charge, although the amount is never fixed or 
published in any written form for the information of strangers. 
They must learn it by experience. 

We, as a rule, to whom the European measures are new, give 
too much. Englishmen of rank and wealth complain that 
Americans raise the costs of travel wherever they go. 

For the gratuity to cab-drivers, waiters at restaurants, etc., 

|M the recognized European usage is in England one penny for every 

^shilling spent in fare or at the table, and in France and Italy 

two sous for every franc spent. This rule disposes of a large 

portion of the cases. 

For porters, twopence in England and two sous on the Conti- 
nent for every piece of luggage handled, if it is only to carry it 
across a pavement. An umbrella or a shawl is a piece as well 
as a trunk. The driver of an omnibus cab, or fiacre, as a point 



442 APPENDIX. 

of etiquette and out of professional consideration for the porters, 
will refuse to touch a piece of luggage himself, — even to lift it 
from three feet away into his vehicle. 

Visiting at private houses of the upper classes in England the 
servants expect their tips in gold coin if your stay is over a day 
or two. The smallest English gold coin is a ten-shilling piece, 
— ^2.50. You fee the footman who attends your bedroom ; the 
maid, if you have ladies, who serves their chambers ; the butler 
who has charge of the dining-room and force of waiters ; the 
keeper, if you hunt: the groom you use if you ride, or J,he head 
of the stables if there are several ; and generally any servant 
that you specially use. One soon learns by intuition how to 
grade these fees according to the rank of the servant and the 
length of his visit. The guard on a gentleman's stage-coach 
running on a line of travel expects a half-crown ; the guard on 
a public coach something less, — about a shilling. 

On first-class ocean-steamers the gratuities are much analo- 
gous to those in a gentleman's house. The steward who waits 
on you at the table and the one who attends your state-room 
will each expect a fee in gold — ten shillings, $2.50, at least — 
from a single passenger, a pound if you have baths brought into 
your room every morning, are particular about having your 
wines warmed or iced, or, in short, use the servants up to their 
full capacity. AVhen the passage is $60 to $75 or less, these fees 
are less, — about one-half of the figures above. The "Boots" 
also looks to be remembered, — about one-half the amount given 
the steward. 

There is an aristocratic afiectation in the use of coin in Eng- 
land. The fashionable world always gives its charities and 
subscriptions in guineas and not pounds, and in return its pet 
tradesmen and swell shops always charge in guineas for their 
wares or work. The difi'erence is just one shilling on the pound, 
the pound being twenty shillings, the guinea twenty-one. There 
is no guinea coin. In its smaller tips, too, fashion uses the half- 
crown, and not the two-shilling florin. I confess that to myself, 
a stranger, the florin was always a particularly objectionable 
and low-bred looking coin, although I could never understand 
the reason of the prejudice. 

The expense of this gratuity business in ordinary travel is, 
in general, rather exaggerated. The sums given are very small, 
and you get a great deal for them, a willing, perfect, and kindly 
service which you do not get in our country at all. To the trav- 
eller the custom is an annoyance rather than a burden. It must 
be borne in mind that for the most part in foreign lands these 
fees are not largess or bounty, but a right, — the regular wages 
for specific labor performed. The porter or gar^on or driver 
has a right to them and from you. And in the matter of impo- 



HINTS OF TRAVEL. 443 

sition these persons are fully as much sinned against as sinning. 
No one who has travelled much but has noticed again and again 
outwardly respectable enough looking people attempting to steal 
away from servants or evade the proper tariff of drivers and 
porters. 

The worst feature of the whole business is the demoralization 
and want of self-respect which it engenders on the part of the 
classes who receive their compensation in this way as a gratuity, 
and not as wages. Persons in the habit of accepting gratuities 
and doing their service for these are certainly not in fit training 
for the independent responsibilities of citizenship, and in this 
view the custom, which, without its European foundation of 
right, is creeping into this country, has a special social interest 
for us. 

The habit of accepting bounties degrades, demoralizes, and 
unmans the recipient, and that fairly-earned compensation should 
be systematically paid in this way — that whole classes should 
be forced to receive their return for their labor in this humili- 
ating form — is but another proof of that fatal despising of hu- 
manity and the common manhood of all men which so thoroughly 
pervades the European life. It is sad to think that a very great 
portion of the people of Great Britain and Europe do now receive 
their wages in this way, look for it, and feel no humiliation in 
the transaction. You can hardly insult anybody across the 
water by an offer of anything, no matter what appears to be 
his or their official position. I have given a shilling in London 
to uniformed policemen and a franc in Paris to magnificent- 
looking hotel managers. A Philadelphia acquaintance in Lon- 
don had several hundred dollars brought to him from his banking- 
house — one of the largest there — by a clerk of the establishment, 
and the nattily-dressed young gentleman asked for a shilling 
for his services. Imagine the consequences of offering ten cents 
to a conductor on the Pennsylvania Railway who had shown 
you to your seat in the car and given you information as to 
when to get out; yet this is done all over England every day, 
and the middle-aged uniformed and respectable-looking guard 
hangs around stickily till he gets his sixpence. 

There is nothing, on the whole, for which one may feel prouder 
of our country, in contrast with others, than the moral stamina 
and self-respect of the American employee, who would resent 
as an indignity the gratuity for which the European begs. That 
legendary fellow-countryman of ours spoke out of a full heart 
and with a just national pride, who, homeward bound, from the 
bridge of his Liverpool steamer, addressed the crowded wharf: 
" If there is any man, woman, or child on this island to whom 
I have not yet given a shilling, now is the time to speak." 



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